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Elliot Kirk's avatar
Elliot Kirk
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Oct 04, 2019

Updates to the New Tab Page in Microsoft Edge Insider preview builds

Preview builds of the next version of Microsoft Edge include an all-new New Tab Page, which gives users the option of personalized layouts that provide options for search, top sites, and a personalized feed depending on your preferences.

 

Over the past several months, we’ve gotten tons of great feedback from our Insider community on additional configuration options you’d like to see on the New Tab Page. This week, we’ve rolled out a new set of updates to all Canary and Developer channel preview builds of Microsoft Edge to address some of the top feedback.

 

Content Visibility Customization

One of the most common requests we heard is that power users wanted more options to configure the page layout, in addition to the “Focused,” “Inspirational,” and “Informational” defaults. The updated New Tab Page now includes granular options under the “Custom” layout, allowing you to enable/disable and configure individual elements of the layout:

 

 

  • Content visible shows a selection of personalized news and more on the page each time you open a new tab, making it easy to stay up to date on the latest.
  • Headings only gives you quick access to your personalized interests, while hiding the main feed until you click or scroll.
  • Content visible on scroll hides both the interest headings and content, with just a subtle hint to access your feed by clicking or scrolling.
  • Content off removes additional content from the page entirely, for the most lightweight experience.

 

Dark theme

We also heard that elements of the New Tab Page could be jarring when the browser was in the Dark theme. Now, if you’ve selected a the “Dark” theme for Microsoft Edge, the New Tab Page will now reflect that as well. Dark theme is supported on all layout modes for the New Tab Page including menus, top sites and news.

 

Dark theme is now supported across all configurations of the New Tab Page

 

Personalizing your feed

The Microsoft News interests hub just got a refresh. Click “Personalize” to see which interests you currently follow in your newsfeed. Customize your feed by removing interests from “My Interests” or adding interests by exploring the categories. The left navigation makes exploration easy. Click the “+” icon to add and the green check mark to remove an interest. For convenience, your chosen interests will also appear in the horizontal navigation above the newsfeed.  

 

 

We hope you love these updates to the New Tab Page! We’re continuing to make incremental changes to refining the experience, and we would love to hear your additional feedback or suggestions.

Send feedback at any time with the Send a Smile button

 

You can send feedback at any time by clicking the “Send feedback” smiley icon in the top-right corner of Microsoft Edge, or by typing Alt+Shift+I to open the feedback tool.

– Uday Pharate, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft News

  • lister1911's avatar
    lister1911
    Brass Contributor
    Oct 05, 2019

    Elliot Kirk  Newbie here! I've just started using Dev Edge (New Edge as I call it) and one issue with tabs on the New Edge is how crowded they are; with Old Edge, I literally have 50 or 60 tabs open at a time and I can clearly tell what each one is. It does require that I scroll side to side to see them all, but with New Edge, all the tabs are shown at once, and with that many tabs open, they are so squished together, I can't identify a single one! Will you widen the tabs to better mimic Old Edge, or will this be customizable in the future so power tab users like me can actually tell what I've got open?

     

    Also, this may be the wrong place to ask, but scrolling is much too fast on New Edge. Old Edge, on the other hand, is nice, and smooth, and reasonable. Anyway to currently adjust this, or if not, in the future maybe?

     

    Thanks!

     

     

     

    • Drew1903's avatar
      Drew1903
      Silver Contributor
      Oct 08, 2019

      lister1911 

      Hi Lister,

      Smooth scrolling IS coming.  In the meantime do this...


      Cheers,
      Drew

      • lister1911's avatar
        lister1911
        Brass Contributor
        Oct 08, 2019

        Drew1903 

         

        Got it, thanks Drew! It's not quite smooth scrolling, but it's definitely better!

         

        Appreciate the help!

    • HotCakeX's avatar
      HotCakeX
      MVP
      Oct 08, 2019

      lister1911 

      Hi,

      you're right, in the Edge classic we could view a small picture of the whole tab preview at the top of them, however in Chromium there is something similar and it will show you a preview picture of the tabs at the bottom of them.

      it's called Tab hover card images but it's not available in Edge insider, only google chrome and it'd look like this

       

       

      I hope Microsoft adds it, for now only Tab hover cards is available

       

       

       

      for Smooth Scrolling, it's also available right now in Edge insider and you can active is using the flag

       

       

      only changes that will come are improvements to this flag to make it even better, some of them are coming this month in October, some will come at later time. more details:

       

      https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Discussions/Top-feedback-summary-for-October-1/td-p/886926

      • lister1911's avatar
        lister1911
        Brass Contributor
        Oct 08, 2019

        HotCakeX

        Thanks very much for the info!

         

        Unfortunately, I can't find where to set the flag for Smooth Scrolling. I looked everywhere under Settings and I couldn't find any reference to it, or to Experiments for that matter. I even tried using the search function under Settings, but search also didn't recognize either Smooth Scrolling or Experiments. I'm probably missing the obvious, right? I'm using Dev Edge if it matters.

         

        Also, I understand what you're referring to with the small tab preview in Edge Classic (Old Edge to me!), but I'm not even talking about that. The tabs themselves are much larger in Edge Classic so that I can see a website's icon as well as the beginning text of the page's name. In Edge Insider, the tabs are so tiny, if I don't recognize the little icon, I can't tell anything about them!

         

        Here's what it looks like in Edge Classic with a boat-load of tabs open:

         

         

         

        As you can see, Edge Classic had much bigger tabs. Thanks again for taking the time to reply. I was having some trouble getting these pictures to upload.

    • Filipe Castro's avatar
      Filipe Castro
      Brass Contributor
      Oct 09, 2019
      Totally agree with the tabs.
      Related to the scrolling, I think it was actually something windows changed (I noticed it too). Just go to your mouse wheel settings and change it there ("Choose how many lines to scroll each time"). It solved my issues.
      • lister1911's avatar
        lister1911
        Brass Contributor
        Oct 10, 2019

        Filipe Castro 

        Great tip! I changed mine from the default setting of 3 lines, down to 1, and that slowed things down quite a bit.

         

        Thanks!

  • TanvirArjel's avatar
    TanvirArjel
    Brass Contributor
    Oct 09, 2019

     

    Elliot Kirk News feed is still completely broken in Dev Version 79.0.294.1. Is it still a bug or am the individual facing the problem?

     

    Please someone inform.

     

    Thanks

    • Drew1903's avatar
      Drew1903
      Silver Contributor
      Oct 09, 2019

      TanvirArjel 

      Tanvir,

      IF, you are talking about the New Feeds on Dev NTP, for me, it is not 'broken' nor has it been 'broken'.



      Cheers,
      Drew

    • HotCakeX's avatar
      HotCakeX
      MVP
      Oct 09, 2019

      TanvirArjel 

      TanvirArjel wrote:

       

      Elliot Kirk News feed is still completely broken in Dev Version 79.0.294.1. Is it still a bug or am the individual facing the problem?

       

      Please someone inform.

       

      Thanks

       

       

      It's broken for me as well

      Version 79.0.298.0 (Official build) canary (64-bit)

      It's been like this since the past few canary updates

       

       

       

       

    • ImRan420's avatar
      ImRan420
      Iron Contributor
      Oct 22, 2019
      It was broken for me as well then I reset the whole edge then it start working normally.
  • lister1911's avatar
    lister1911
    Brass Contributor
    Oct 10, 2019

    Elliot Kirk 

    I initially reported that in Edge Classic, the tabs are much larger and easier to see, and that with Edge Insider (79.0.294.1 dev 64bit) the tabs are crowded and super tiny. Well, I discovered a related issue last night; in Edge Classic we could scroll side to side because not all the tabs were visible across the top of the browser. Since they were larger, scrolling side to side was necessary so you could get to the tabs you couldn't see off screen. Well, with the new Edge Insider, it will cram all the tabs together to try and fit them all on screen, except that after about 85 or so, the rest are simply off screen and not shown or accessible via the mouse. And there's no way to get to them except by using shortcuts (ctrl+tab or ctrl+sft+tab) because there's no side scroll capability. I'm not sure if you folks had noticed that, because I'd wager not a lot of people are silly like me and have over 85 tabs open at once! But if you do have that many open, it becomes a significant pain to find those invisible tabs.

     

    Thanks very much!

    • HotCakeX's avatar
      HotCakeX
      MVP
      Oct 10, 2019
      lister1911 wrote:

      Elliot Kirk 

      I initially reported that in Edge Classic, the tabs are much larger and easier to see, and that with Edge Insider (79.0.294.1 dev 64bit) the tabs are crowded and super tiny. Well, I discovered a related issue last night; in Edge Classic we could scroll side to side because not all the tabs were visible across the top of the browser. Since they were larger, scrolling side to side was necessary so you could get to the tabs you couldn't see off screen. Well, with the new Edge Insider, it will cram all the tabs together to try and fit them all on screen, except that after about 85 or so, the rest are simply off screen and not shown or accessible via the mouse. And there's no way to get to them except by using shortcuts (ctrl+tab or ctrl+sft+tab) because there's no side scroll capability. I'm not sure if you folks had noticed that, because I'd wager not a lot of people are silly like me and have over 85 tabs open at once! But if you do have that many open, it becomes a significant pain to find those invisible tabs.

       

      Thanks very much!

      lister1911 

       

      This is great suggestion, I felt the need for this too, sometimes I have to keep at least 100-200 tabs open and that's when the problem starts

       

  • matt_bits's avatar
    matt_bits
    Iron Contributor
    Oct 10, 2019

    Elliot Kirk Enterprise version of NTP is very good. I think the personal one should take inspiration out of it. I like to have recent OneDrive documents, important new emails, latest Facebook feed, RSS feed, and other web notification aggregated on the NTP, instead of some random news from newspaper. It would be much more helpful.

    Anyway, I like very much the inspirational view with huge image of the day. It makes me calm and relaxed when starting the day.

    • Drew1903's avatar
      Drew1903
      Silver Contributor
      Oct 10, 2019

      matt_bits 

      Personally, Matt, I quite like the daily photo with everything else OFF.  I do wish Bing.com could be the NTP.  Although, I have it as Start-up page w/ its menu bar, wish it was the NTP, too.  The search in NTP , certainly, is Bing, but, cannot do visual searches.

      Cheers,
      Drew

    • HotCakeX's avatar
      HotCakeX
      MVP
      Oct 10, 2019
      Hi, by Enterprise version of NTP, do you mean the customization that can be done using GP? cause I can't see any news in this post about Enterprise NTP
  • Reggie777's avatar
    Reggie777
    Copper Contributor
    Oct 10, 2019

    I've been struggling with the Hide Site option. There are certain topics that I have absolutely no interest in. And certain propaganda right wing "news source" that I have no desire to see anything they have to peddle. I have tried time and time again to Hide these sites, e.g. yahoo sports. NFL, sportnaut, and they always seem to come back. It is irritating, I know. And a small point. But it is also why I dropped your app on my mobile, because MSN does NOT allow me to ignore the same right wing propaganda site. So, I stayed away from MSN home for some time. Now, sadly, Edge is on the same path. Also, please address your right leaning Week in Cartoons. Give us the option to choose who we want to watch. I've almost given up on Edge. And I liked other features too. Just not enough to have to put up with things I don't want to see.

  • magius1962's avatar
    magius1962
    Copper Contributor
    Oct 13, 2019
    Way back when we had two browsers, Internet Explorer or Netscape, I perfered to use Internet Explorer as it was easy to view, edit and save the page source code using Notepad. Please bring back viewing source code with Notepad. This is one of the main reasions I still use Internet Explorer and not Edge or Chrome. Can you please add a registry key to change what loads when we click on view source. E.G. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Edge\engineChrome\View Source Editor\Editor Name = 'C:\Windows\system32\NOTEPAD.exe'
    • HotCakeX's avatar
      HotCakeX
      MVP
      Oct 14, 2019

      magius1962 

       

      Right-click on any web page

       

       

      Select "View Page Source"

      and copy the codes into a Notepad.

       

       

    • Drew1903's avatar
      Drew1903
      Silver Contributor
      Oct 14, 2019

      magius1962 

      Have you explored the Developer Tools?  Might be interesting to you...

      Cheers,
      Drew