Creating a Beautiful, Informative and Productive New Tab Experience

[MissyQ]

We’ve been working very closely with teams across a variety of Microsoft services to deliver a comprehensive new tab page experience that is beautiful, fast, reliable and productive.

• We’ve integrated a daily background image from the Bing home page that surfaces inspiring scenes from around the world, piques your curiosity to explore deeper, and celebrates our global community.
• We provide personalized news powered by Microsoft News, delivering quality content from journalists & publishers in more than 140 countries and 28 languages.
• We’ve seamlessly incorporated Azure Active Directory identity to connect with additional Microsoft enterprise services. Search your organization’s resources with Microsoft Search in Bing and experience a dynamic and personalized set of your most relevant Office documents, internal web sites, company resources, and other Microsoft 365 content via the enterprise new tab experience.
• When signed in with your Microsoft Account you can collect Microsoft Rewards for your searches, and we respect your privacy by giving you full control over your search history in the Microsoft Privacy Dashboard.

We appreciate your requests for more customization on the new tab page experience, and we are pleased to address many of your requests: dark theme on new tabs, an option to turn the news feed completely off, the ability to select a country or region for news independently of browser UI language or actual location, an option to mute certain news publishers, the ability to rename top site tiles, and an option to use your own custom background wallpaper on new tabs. Please keep the feedback coming!

Additionally, we hear your feedback on wanting more control over the new tab search box. We're now actively experimenting with the in-page search box, and you should start seeing updates in Canary channel and Dev channel in the next few weeks. Having said that, it takes time to iterate, learn, and accomplish the high quality of deeply integrated services within Microsoft Edge. While we're in this phase the design will continue to evolve as we evaluate the best option. The first experiment we’re trying is to provide an option to use the address bar when searching on new tabs, like some other browsers do.

As always, we want to offer you flexibility so that you remain in control of your browser experience. If your customization needs are beyond what’s currently available (and coming!) in Microsoft Edge’s new tab page experience, we also support new tab browser extensions. You can read more about installing extensions, including extensions from other extension stores, here.

Thank you again for sending us your feedback! Please continue to test insider builds and send us your thoughts.

Sincerely,

The Microsoft Edge New Tab Experience Team

[#2]

Thank you for the updates@MissyQ 

These sound great!
being able to set custom image for New tab page and change the search engine.

also I have more feedbacks for the New Tab Page:

1. Please let us add More tiles for the NTP, currently we can only add 7 tiles in the New tab page. add another row under it so we can add 14 sites/tiles.
2. Edge should not change the New tab page sites/tiles that user manually sets. there needs to be an option so we can "PIN" the tiles we add and they Don't get changed with most visited sites (based on user's browsing behavior).
3. also sync the New tab page tiles with the New tab page tiles on Edge mobile (Android/IOS).
4. Let us Change the image (favicon) shown on New Tab page Tiles.

[#3]

-For some reason I have 8 pinned tiles instead of 7 on my NTP @HotCakeX . But I fully agree that there should be a second row of tiles. Currently on Version 82.0.453.0 but has been that way forever.

-As to your second point, I presume that you are talking here about Edge/Android since the manually pinned tiles in Edge/Chromium are not automatically changed to most visited sites. Again, I fully agree, also about the sync.

[#4]

I have 8 tiles too but the last one is a plus + sign.

[#5]

Mine are fully populated @HotCakeX . By the way, it seems that the green update badge/indicator stopped working again prior to latest update.

[#6]

@Jacques Van de Meerssche 

Yeah i mean you can either leave it to be a plus sign or add something to make it 8th tile

[#7]

@MissyQ thanks to you and the team for all your hard work. Edge NTP with the latest customization features is my favorite NTP of all time and makes Edge the only browser that hasn't sent me scrambling to replace the NTP with something else or find extensions to fix shortcomings. You guys obviously understand this page is as the first thing we when opening a new tab.

Inspirational mode with news feed off is my favorite. I prefer keeping a tight focus. I can head over to the Microsoft News app if I want to scroll through headlines. Also, as someone involved in personal and work-related browsing, I'm intrigued to see how integrated Microsoft Search develops. Keep up the good work!

[#8]

@MissyQ Since a few weeks, the new tab page has switched from Bing's daily wallpaper to images from Windows Spotlight (including the option to like/dislike in the corner). Why was this changed? Though I'm quite happy with the NTP either way because you choose beautiful pictures and they change frequently (though they seem to change more rarely now than they used to with Bing wallpapers).

[#9]

@adrianghc 

Spoiler

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@adrianghc wrote:

@MissyQ Since a few weeks, the new tab page has switched from Bing's daily wallpaper to images from Windows Spotlight (including the option to like/dislike in the corner). Why was this changed? Though I'm quite happy with the NTP either way because you choose beautiful pictures and they change frequently (though they seem to change more rarely now than they used to with Bing wallpapers).

---

Hi, @Deleted posted a response for it in here

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/microsoft-edge-home-screen/m-p/1220005

[#10]

Indeed, thanks a lot!

[#11]

Anytime ;)

[#12]

Option for Email and Calendar widgets on the New tab Page

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/option-for-email-and-calendar-widgets-on-the-new-...

[#13]

@HotCakeX 

1) Definitely! Lets get some ideas for new tab page fromFirefox/Vivaldi browsers

2) Agree!

3) Agree! Not just for mobilemusers but sync option for other instances logged in with same sync account

4) I do not think so, there should be some universal "edge" favicon for a new tab

Moreover - add a custom search provider

[#14]

@Deleted 

You can custom search engine from here edge://settings/searchEngines

from the top select add

[#15]

@HotCakeX 

I know, but not for the new tab page :)

[#16]

Oh okay, by the way on #4 i was referring to the favicon for the tiles, not the new tab page itself.
the tiles are either most visited sites that Edge automatically adds there or user can add them manually.

[#17]

It would be nice if we could set the Office NTP for normal consumer accounts as well. I'd see a lot of added value from it, honestly don't get why this is only for enterprise.

[#18]

@MissyQ Thanks for sharing these details with us :) !
One of the few issues I have with the NTP is that when you go offline, the top sites are not displayed anymore 

The background is quite nice to be fair, but as a developer I happen to have quite a few localhost links pinned in there that I would still like to access without internet connexion, even if they hide the beautiful background :,( ! I'd love them to get added back there someday. Until then, staring at this background feels strangely nice so I'm fine with it ;) ! 
Thanks again to the team for all your work on this great browser !

[#19]

@MissyQ 

Is great that you are committed to providing a quality Azure Enterprise NTP, but please don't forget about those who are On-Prem.

At my company we only allow people to read the news during their lunch break, so we really need a management policy to lock down the NTP view.  We don't mind if people have background images, but we need to disable Content.  This is one of the blocking issues that is stopping us from rolling out Edge.

It would also be nice if we could display a custom background, or even a slideshow of images stored locally or on a network folder.

+1 for the ability to choose how many favourite links you want. I could probably fit 10x5 links on my 1080p screen.  A single row of 7/8 icons isn't enough

[#20]

Thanks so much to everyone for providing your thoughts on and support for these changes. Here's a quick recap of what I think you're asking for:

• You would love an email and calendar widget of some kind.
  • What would that look like? Just a couple links into mail & calendar? Preview of upcoming appointments & email? How many lines?
• You want to be able to have more tiles, ideally another row.
• You want to pin your favorite tiles, and have those sync to mobile.
• The ability to change the favicon/picture on each quick link tile would be beneficial.
• Those of you using personal and AD (not AAD) accounts want to see the Office new tab page available.
• You expect that the new tab page should continue to show quick link tiles even when you are offline.

These are all great things! We have added an item for the ability to add more tiles to the new tab page on our Top Feedback Summary. You should see updates around that over there.

I have ensured the PM who owns the new tab page has seen all this feedback. Are there any features from other browsers' new tab pages that catch your eye? The team would love to know more about those, on top of these specific items I've listed above. Keep the feedback coming!

Missy Quarry (she/her/hers)
Community Manager - Microsoft Edge