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 Inspirational view is my favorite, the only recommendation I would make is to turn the search box translucent, so that you can see through it a little. That hard white rectangle breaks up the beautiful image, but a transparent (or translucent) search box would soften the blow.
Elliot Kirk Thinking back to the previous Edge, there used to be cards on the right hand side, which displayed weather, favorite teams schedule, and watched stock quotes. Will this be coming back? I liked those features.
Elliot Kirk I like the three prefab layout options plus the Custom one, but they all have a caveat in common: the search engine is set to Bing and cannot be changed. This is a dark pattern that I am not willing to accept. It's 2019 and we should be able to choose the search engine that we prefer.
teezeh
One can, certainly, Add search engines to the browser. New tab is Bing (Bing.com) with all the power, features and abilities of Bing. Putting other things in there would be like having Fords in a Ferrari showroom; It is a Ferrari showrrom for Ferraris, makes sense. But, you are not limited to Bing in the browser.
Cheers,
Drew
delgadogarciafj@gmail.com
Es una idea genial que funciona muy bien y muy rapida@
paco_Delgado
For those who do not read Spanish:
"Es una idea genial que funciona muy bien y muy rapida", Paco
Is a great idea that works very well and very fast
Si, y yo pensa el mismo!
English: I agree
Too bad Edge C won't translate (instead of me 😉)
Cheers,
Drew
- I like the customizability. How about increasing the number of quick link tiles and being able to pin them to the page? You could have a setting for the user to select the number of tiles to display. Make it a sort of Favorites page. (I know that there's a Favorites menu buried somewhere, but this makes it much quicker to select a specific page. I also hope to see Set Aside Tabs coming soon. 🤓😊
Dan, no need for it to be buried.Ctrl+Shift+B will always show it. And, also, it can be set to Always or Never show & Ctrl+Shift+B will , still, turn it 'on' & 'off', no matter what the setting. I say this because the Fav Bar likely has those same "most visited sites", already... from you putting them there.
Cheers,
Drew- Drew,
Okay, I see what you're saying about the <CTRL> <SHIFT> B. Cool beans!
Dan
It's fairly clear from the responses to your request so far that the most wanted option is choice! There are those who appreciate colourful backgrounds and the news feed, while others prefer a less busy page, all the way to having it completely blank. Here are my own preferences:
- Show the bookmarks bar on NTP only.
- An 'icons only' option for the bookmarks bar;
- A simple way to assign an icon to a bookmark when it doesn't have a native one. These are my bookmarklets*:
- Remove the Bing search bar (one of the most popular requests among classic Edge users, too);
- Allow customization of the frequently-used tiles. In particular,
◦ change the label to differentiate between sites with the same favicon:
◦ allow tiles to be re-ordered;
◦ allow for more rows of tiles (as used to be possible in IE)
* OK, bookmarklets aren't much use on the NTP, so that was only to illustrate why an 'icons only' setup wouldn't be much use either in this situation. I'm really pleased that they work, though!
I've failed completely to work out what that icon is supposed to represent. It looks most like a rabbit sledging downhill.
Elliot Kirk Good starting point! Now that we don't have a sidebar for our favorites, I would like to see a more customizable quick links tiles in the new tab with the ability to group them into folders and split into sections the same way we can arrange tiles in the Windows start menu. Thanks.
As already mentioned by some others: it would be nice to be able to select a region/language for the news feed on the "new tab page". Being from Europe, I'm not interested in all the US news. In the non-chromium Edge there was an easy option to select this region though.
BenjaVR
Ben,
Ok, if it is not possible for Europe, I might know why or will hazard a 'guess'. Going by what I have here in Canada, I instinctively reckoned you would have Europe or specific Countries as Sections, you know what I mean. Anyway, back to what I'll suggest. The Edge Dev & Canary are betas. Edge is not. it is not uncommon, if not normal prescident, that whilst building something with betas they will be, at least for a time, English (United States) and US Region. That's not to say that come Offical release, other languages & regions won't be supported. When no longer beta won't be only English & only US.
NB: They use 'US' losely as it sort of means North America. Although, Windows Insider Builds only JUST added a slew of languages to Dictation. Regular Win10, STILL, will only do it with keyboard set to English (US).
Anyway, to re-enforce my point, here. Taking another look 👀 at my own & more closely at something I noticed earlier... Yes, there is a Canada 'link' (marked) that does go to Canadian content, exclusively. The My Feed (unmarkked) is a wide array of categories, but, including Canadaian features. However, looking lower down at the selections, there is World News & US. I think betas are like this , instead of going with 'universal' support because in doesn't make sense to sink heaps of time & effort into dressing a lab rat up with a slew of outfits. Once it's work is done & it can go out in public, that's different. Please, run with my lame analogy 😉 I suggest the lack out 'global' support is temporay and will not be the case by the time Edge C goes live or non-beta. Certainly, I could be wrong; there's a 1st time for everything (J/K 😉😁)
An aside: There are a bunch of categories when one hits the More ellipsis ... (to the right of Money)
Cheers,
Drew
Just as in other browsers, I would like to have the opportunity to use a curtain website for a new tab.
- It's already available
Elliot Kirk I would like to determine the content of a New Tab page myself. For example, the choice for a completely empty page.
Deleted
That IS available, at least, in Canary it is. Would travel to Dev fairly soon, one would think. Without redirecting it (to be) an assigned page, it can be as blank as this...
Cheers,
Drew
