Open New Tab with a Blank Page Option

Bronze Contributor

This is a very small thing, but I would love to see Edge Chromium allow an "Open new tab with a blank page" option, as Edge Classic does.  

9 Replies
Thank you @tomscarbach. I will let the New Tab PAge folks know about this ask.

@Elliot Kirk 

Adding to this, I would appreciate if you guys exposed the local new tab page. I would love build my own NTP or make modifications to the default local NTP.

@_shellprompt1515 

Actually, you can make a chrome extension to do this. I have already made one. Blank New Tab Page
You can check out developer.chrome.com for more info.

@flyhaozi  "Actually, you can make a chrome extension to do this."

 

Thanks for letting me know.  I'll take a look, but I hope that Microsoft will put the "open to blank page" option into the browser itself. 

 

Chrome's features/functions (including "new tab" options, or more accurately, lack of options) seem to have been closely shaped around Google's business plan (that is, herding users into the Google ecosystem at every turn) rather than user preference/expectation, and quite a number of Chrome extensions have developed as workarounds to allow Chrome to meet user preference/expectation.  

 

Google's single-mindedness about sucking people into the Google ecosystem is one of the reasons that I don't use Chrome at all, and won't. 

@tomscharbach 

I totally agree with you, I found options in chromium is too few when I switch from firefox to the new edge.

@flyhaozi "I found options in chromium is too few when I switch from firefox to the new edge."

 

I have a toe in Linux development, testing for a distro that I like and hope to help become successful, and I keep up with developments among the major distros.  As part of the move toward 18.10 and 19.04 updates, quite a few of the teams responsible for developing distros polled their communities on browser preference.  In each case, Firefox won the poll hands down, and Chromium is no longer the default in most distros.  Firefox is the standard.  I think that there are two reasons for that:  (1) Chromium's lack of user options, in contrast to Firefox, and (2) Chromium's tight integration into the Google ecosystem, which a lot of Linux users (independent to a fault), object to. 

 

Microsoft published a list (see below) of Chromium (not Chrome, but Chromium) services it removed/replaced during development of Edge Chromium, and the list is an indicator of how closely Chromium (supposedly open source and independent) is tied into the Google ecosystem.

 

Edge Chromium, of course, will be integrated with the Windows ecosystem, and that's to be expected.  It doesn't bother me because Microsoft offers Windows 10 users options to opt out of the ecosystem to a large extent if that is what the user wants to do.

 

I just hope that Microsoft ensures that Edge Chromium, unlike Chromium (and Chrome), will be configured to provide a good range of functions and features.

 

Edge-Chromium-Removed.jpg

 

 

@flyhaozi 

Interesting. I don't have any experience with JS, but building a NTP override extension should be the perfect thing to get me started.

It is great that an extension can be made but if we really look at this, most users will not do that or will not be able to find such an extension.

In addition to the time and network resources the non-blank new tab costs, it also ends up being a form of tracking the user.  Microsoft is better than this and should make it an option (if not the default) to not have the browser continually contacting external services every time a tab is opened.

In fact, in secure workstation environments, this just causes even more concern as the network is constrained and all of that remote access is blocked (and potentially logged/alerted about).

Was anything ever reported back to you from the New Tab Page folks, in relation to this request?

Currently I use a third-party extension ' Blank Tab' to achieve this, which in my mind opens all sorts of security concerns.

Can we not just have the option for a blank tab, or an option to specify a default page such as about: blank

Thanks