Forum Discussion
New Tab Page Walkthrough
Microsoft Edge’s new tab experience is designed to be a clean, delightful experience that helps you find what you need on the web and get you where you want to go next. Microsoft Edge starts with a new tab, and you can create more new tabs by clicking the “+” (next to existing tabs).
We’d love to hear what you like about our new tab experience, what doesn’t work for you, and anything more you’d like to see in this experience.
Default layout for new tabs
The default new tab layout uses a daily background wallpaper sourced from Bing’s image of the day collection. This experience also offers the standard in-page search box as well as quick link tiles .
Celebrating the image as the hero of this experience, we’ve created space across the middle for the picture to shine through.
In this layout, News is at your fingertips, just a scroll away To bring it up, you can either click the category headers along the bottom or scroll the page.
In the upper right is a quick way for you to choose various layouts for the page.
Settings flyout
To see more layout choices, explore the settings flyout in the upper right corner of the page.
Focused. Keep it simple.
Focused layout has the fewest visual elements, giving you just the basics: a search box & quick link tiles.
Inspirational. Daily background wallpaper.
This is our default layout, introduced above. Here’s a run through the core elements on the page:
- Daily background wallpaper from Bing.
- Image caption and interactive museum card for more information about each picture. Clicking the museum card takes you to more information about the image.
- A rich repository of news is also at your fingertips, just a scroll away, and can be accessed anytime by scrolling down.
Informational. Stay informed with news.
Informational layout balances news with search & recent sites. In this layout, the rich repository of news powered by Microsoft News is present to help you stay current on the topics you care about.
- Personalized news: click the “Personalize” link to set the topics that will appear in your feed
- We program trusted news from the world’s best journalists in more than 140 countries and 28 languages, keeping you plugged into the events of the day and information relevant to your individual lives.
- Microsoft News keeps people informed across the web, phone and PC, using our long-tested approach of curating news via publishing partnerships, human editors, and AI.
- We work with more than a thousand premium publishers and more than 3,000 brands in all major global markets – like USA Today, The New York Times, FOX News, The Washington Post, and many more – to aggregate the best news, videos, photos and other content and deliver it, for free, to people all over the world.
Other layout customizations
You can explore additional new tab page layout configurations by turning individual toggles on and off.
- Toggling “Show most visited sites” turns on/off the quick link tiles
- Toggling “Image of the day” turns on/off the background wallpaper
- Toggling “Show feeds” moves the news content above/below the visible “fold” of the page
What do you think?
We would love to hear from you. What’s your favorite new tab layout? What additional new tab customization options do you want to have? Anything else you’d like to see changed on new tabs?
Thank you for trying out the new Microsoft Edge and leave your comments below!
106 Replies
Elliot Kirk Please git rid of the chromium tab rendering. The tabs in chromium look like they belong in XP, not Windows 10. Please skin the whole thing like Edge as I much prefer Edge's visuals.
Also, as you are going through the Chromium codebase, please look for all hooks that call Google's services and API and please only allow such hooks to operate on an opt-in basis with no opt-in = true defaults. A nice descriptive settings page spelling them all out so we can make informed decisions would be very nice and go a long way towards building trust with users that Edge is a safer browser than Chrome.
Deleted Elliot Kirk
There are, indeed, reasons we don't use or like Chrome & google stuff. Edge better not go there & give us reason(s) for it not to be our preferred browser, anymore. This, very much, includes security concerns.
Cheers,
Drew- Agree with you there Drew... I still do not understand why people use Chrome which is one of the most unsafe/datamining/unsecure browswers out there. I will not ever use Chrome nor do I use google to search with... Bing all the way....
This new Edge is great so far, other than a few flaws that have been mentioned a million times now. IF they can keep away from being a newer version of Chrome, Edge will go a long way as the choice by I'll bet most folks....
Dennis5mile
Elliot Kirk Love the new tab especially Inspiration option, striking a good balance with nice images and functionality.
There are still more things I think we could make it better (not in order):
- Ability to drag-and-drop Pinned Sites.
- Customization to adjust the maximum amount of Pinned Sites.
- Showing recently closed tabs and from previous session.
- Dark theme support for New Tab page.
- Showing frequently visited sites (Top sites) with an option to permanently pin them.
- Ability to edit Pinned Sites.
- Making Pinned Sites looks like a Live Tile, including some basic functionalities like notification badges if the pinned sites allowed push notifications.
- Ability to assign own wallpaper background for New Tab.
- Ability to set Bing image as desktop or lockscreen wallpaper from New Tab itself.
- Search box on New Tab should have same features and UI like the Addressbar/Omnibar, this includes: Showing weather, calculations, facts, etc that Bing already supports.
- Making design aesthetic of pinned sites exactly like a Live Tile for consistency, maybe minus the colours since making it neutral like light gray or dark gray won't conflict to the wallpaper background. Basically still like the current one but sharpening the corners, left aligned titles and making it square instead of rectangle.
Looking forward for further improvements and kudos to the team working with Edge Chromium project. Cheers!
archtech 100% right!
Dmitry Perednia
Hi Dmitry,
What is 100% right?
Cheers,
Drew
- You copy my thoughts word by word...
I too want all those features specially:
1. To manually determine the maximum no. of pinned sites, and
2. To edit the pinned sites.RUFELLO2260
I'm just anxious to see, to have Pin to taskbar! Bizarre it wasn't there at the onset.
Cheers,
Drew
Wow, Thank you all for the kind words and great suggestions. I know that the feature team responsible for the New Tab Page has been reading through these comments.
- Hi!
How can I personalize the region/language of the content to be shown from Microsoft News?
In previous Edge I could do this through Personalize option, where I could select the language and the region.
In Edge Chromium I can't find this option and always receive content from USA (I'm in Europe).
Thanks in advance for your help!
Cheers,
Jorgejmatos
Hi Jorge,
I'll give you this info, even, if you know any of it, already:
1. OS Region set to your area
2. Set Default location
3. Set Apps to be allowed to know & use #2
4. Set Edge Dev as Default browser (this may not matter)
5. Be signed-in to Edge C browser, Dev or Canary.
Ok, so now, I am showing my Home page, MSN Canada. I shrunk it down in order to show (only) News sections. You can see Calgary, my city, Canada & World. Also, I pointed at Local... if that's hit it gives Calgary news. You see the yellow circles. Same as Edge, with Edge C those Edits give a panel where one picks what sections THEY want. Hit the word Edit > Add section below
I trust this ⬆ helps.
wait a minute... just realised you're asking about this in New tab. Don't you have Europe or your Country where I have Canada?
Having clicked on it
Cheers,
DrewHi Drew1903,
Thank you very much for your help and guidance!
However I don't have a similar option like you have "Canada" (meaning I don't have Europe/the country where I am).
Regarding the other option you've mention, to change the OS location, it's more complicated :)
I am in Poland and I wanted to have news from Portugal, so it's not so simple...
But it's like you say, it's not even beta version, and this is not so central.
Once again, thanks or your help.
Cheers,
Jorge
Hi Elliot Kirk,
Great work! My suggestions would be:
1. To have the ability to put a friendly name when adding the links at the bottom rather than showing the URL.
2. Introduce the ability to edit an existinf link rather than deleting and recreating as current.
3. The ability to change the order of the links.
4. The default pages seems to look a bit too empty with just the search bar and the links. It might give it a bit of fullness to have the MS edge logo (with option to hide) in the top left-corner which would also indicate the Edge browser is being used in contrast to other browsers a user may have open. As its all going Chromium with MS Edge now coming into the mix, browsers are going to look similar. Others may be of another opinion on this...
Kind Regards,
Ahmed
Elliot Kirk I really like having the news on the new tab page. On my small laptop I have Inspirational selected because I want to see the image, but I like that it's easy to get to the news. On my 27" desktop I prefer Informational because I have enough room for both the image and the news.
I must admit, I hadn't thought about how redundant the search box is, given that you can type into the address bar anyway...
- Custom title for manual add quick links will be great.
Aside from most visited sites which should sync with history sync. Is manual quick links sync across devices? - I'm partial to Focused with the light theme. In terms of additions, if we could turn off the news feed if we don't use it at all would be nice. Also, if we could customize the sites on our new tab page further, like renaming them, would be helpful. In your example screenshots you show full names on each but in my usage I'm getting URLs which aren't easily reable or commonly get cut off (example "mobile.twitter...." or "www.youtube....")
Elliot Kirk I'm liking the new tab page so far, but do have some of the same suggestions above:
1). Ability to turn off the search bar (why is it needed when the omnibox functions as the search box?).
2). Ability to turn off the news feed entirely for those times extra focus is required.and to add, unless I missed it:
3). Ability to change location of the news feed for those who live/travel abroad. I'd like to be able to click the settings gear icon and change it which is an option that was available on the old Edge new tab page.
Those seem to be the basics that are missing for me at the moment.
As a bonus: 4). The ability to set quick launch pages in place of "top sites." The UI is nice, but top sites is distracting whereas a minimal favorites-esque set up there would be more useful.A couple of observations:
- Re: News at the bottom of the NTB - I followed the suggestion of @KoshyG (thanks!) "hide the news by enabling "Enable using the Microsoft Edge local NTP" in edge://flags" and it looks much tidier. It's such as shame to have these great Bing images obscured by clutter.
- If you have the NTP in full-screen, then the search bar on the page makes sense, as the omnibox isn't visible.
- My second point raises the following questions:
- Is it possible to automatically open Edge C in full-screen mode?
- When in full-screen, the ability to hover the mouse at the top to see other open tabs and be able to switch to them while remaining in full-screen would be awesome. Especially on a smaller screen, you could really make the most of your screen real estate while keeping maximum productivity if you need to switch between tabs. Same applies to having the taskbar come into view when hovering the mouse at the bottom.
Elliot Kirk I encourage the team to consider additional checkbox options under "Custom", such that the search box and news can be turned off too, resulting in blank NTP if desired with no extension necessary. It seems like this would be easy win vs. the seemingly popular opinion that NTP search/news elements can't be turned off in browsers because the vendor wants to advertise the search/news service. It also allows people to turn off what they consider to be distracting.
If the team doesn't agree, then it might be wise to ensure there's at least one NTP customization extension in the Edge extension store during beta to measure popularity and ensure tester coverage on that type of extension. (There are a number of extensions on Chrome Web Store that blank the NTP, these do appear to work in Edge Dev but we have to pop out to the Chrome Web Store to get them.)
I really like the inspirational view a lot. While I would've preferred to use my own wallpaper its still good the way it is. I would also like to be able to change the search bar to a custom search provider.
What I'm really missing is the option to grab and rearrange my favorite tiles. Also I miss the option to use a custom picture for the favorite tiles. I would also be really nice to have as many rows with my favorites as I like.
