My theory is that the Edge team doesn't want the empty tab page to exist. They want everyone to use their not-quite-Google-app experience. Some of their corporate customers probably pushed back on the change, so the code is left in, but only for those big companies that protest the change.

My conclusion is simple: if you don't like the new homepage, Edge is not for you. The feature is clearly not something the developers want to support, so even if you get it to work, it's probably not going to get any priority during testing. Either swallow the Edge tab page or pick another browser, because the alternatives range from annoying to use to painful to keep working.

Everything MS does around windows is designed to push/lock their customers into the office365/bing ecosystem.

A blank page contains no Bing/office365 integration so of cause cannot be allowed to persist.

If your company wants the convenience of our products you must enable us to syphon even more data from your employees.