How to open a Blank Tab or Page when you launch Edge browser

When you open a new tab in the new Microsoft Edge (Chromium), it offers a rather personalized experience. You can see an image of the day, quick links, the content section, which comes mainly from Microsoft News, it is entertaining and takes up a lot of space. However, there is no option to open an empty tab in Edge that has nothing in the body section. I remember that Edge HTML or Edge Legacy had these features – but more in the new version.

How to open a blank tab or page in Microsoft Edge

So now that we know that it is not possible to open a blank tab or page, here is what I did to get close to it. It’s a workaround, and you may or may not like it. However, this is the closest thing you can have. There are two ways to do this.

1. Open a blank page when you launch Edge
2. Open a nearly blank New Tab page

The blank tab or page is generally preferred because it opens quickly.

1]Open blank tabs or pages when launching Edge

Although Edge doesn’t allow you to open a blank tab when you open a new tab, you can do so when you launch Edge for the first time.

• Open Edge, then click the three-dot menu to open Settings
• Go to Navigate> At startup. Select Open specific page (s)
• Click the Add New Page button.
• Type about: virgin and click on the Add button
• Add multiple pages with about: virgin as the URL. So every time you open it, you have many blank tabs

2]Almost blank new tab page

Here we will first remove all the extra lingo that we get again on each new TAB.

• Launch Microsoft Edge and open a new tab
• Click on the gear icon available at the top right
• Under Layout, click Custom
• Here you will have three options
  • Show quick links: deactivate
  • Picture of the day – Deactivate
  • Content: select Content disabled

So once you have disabled the image of the day, quick links and the image of the day, you will have an almost empty tab with Microsoft Bing Search. Chrome offers something similar for each new tab.

This is the closest blank page or new minimal tab experience you would get as there is no way to remove the Bing search box. It doesn’t look that bad and it will be the least distracting.