14 DAY TRIAL // In theory, the New Tab Page in the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge is a very useful part of the browser, as it provides you with content that could come in handy, all based on your settings.
So for example, the NTP can be configured to display a search box, news from user-defined categories, and a custom background.
But at the same, if you just want a clean version of the New Tab Page, there’s a hidden version that represents the fallback background when the NTP itself fails to load.
Someone on reddit discovered that if you block ntp.msn.com in the Windows hosts file or configure the NTP to chrome-search://local-ntp/local-ntp.html as a group policy, the fallback page is automatically loaded in Microsoft Edge, as you can see in the demo here.
Lighter, faster version
While some settings for the NTP do exist in Microsoft Edge, there’s no option to use this page as default in the browser.
“There are issues with current edge NTP. It’s slow. You’re connecting to their MSN service to load your new tab entirely. If it can’t connect you’re shown the fallback. Which itself is lighter. So it has the potential to open and load faster. You’re also forced to query Bing. Where as chrome, it’s entirely local and loads faster. It also respects your search provider and the new tab will load an optimised version of the search provider,” redditor cbabbx who posted this finding explains.
Using the Group Policy Editor obviously means that you must be running Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise, as this feature isn’t available in the Home version of the operating system.
You can find the instructions on how to edit the hosts file in the video below if you want to try this out on your own.