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Comment by yborg | Hacker News Reader

I found a Chrome extension called, appropriately enough, "Empty New Tab Page" that works fine on Edge that accomplishes this without registry editing.

But yes, kind of flabbergasted when I discovered that Microsoft was strong-arming the new tab page. Apparently the lessons of 20 years ago have been forgotten in Redmond.

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There's more. When you add the "Empty New Tab Page", it's disabled by default and you need to enable it manually. Then, when you open a new tab the first time, it asks if the blank tab is a mistake and if you want to revert back.

It reminds me of the early 00's when everyone was installing add-ons that hijacked the IE start page or redirect 404/DNS errors. That's the ONLY reason I can imagine that would make MS think this UX is acceptable.

I believe these protectionsaare there for good reason. I've lost count of the third party "search engines" that I've seen taking over people's homepages through extensions.

These extensions try to mimick Google and make it as hard as they possibly can to remove them. You have to remove the extension, remove the default search engine, change the homepage, and hope thst whatever crapware installed them doesn't get run again.

Chrome and Firefox have been fighting this crapware for years now and when Microsoft switched to Blink they inherited the same protection mechanisms.

You can still use these extensions, but only if you ACTUALLY want to. In most cases these alerts trigger, I don't believe the user has made a conscious choice to change their homepage.

It may be for a good reason but there should always be an option for the handful of people who know what they are doing and know that they know what they are doing to enable the functionality that they are expecting from the software.

When you deviate from industry standard (especially in a negative way) and intentionally prevent reversion back to industry standards you're doing it wrong.

While not as serious, Firefox only allows you to set the new tab page as 1. blank or 2. the Firefox home page.

I wanted to use a startpage for every new tab and was surprised to find that it's not trivial at all, eventually gave up.

I'm a long time Firefox user and MS critic, yet feel forced to remark that this dumbing down of browsers seems to be happening beyond Microsoft.

> this dumbing down of browsers seems to be happening beyond Microsoft.

Add for Chromium the fact they don't give non Mac users the option to prompt a warning before exiting, because designers think that hiding an option for Windows/Linux is better for the users. Any idea what blog/book this designers (I include the GNOME ones) read that brainwashed them?

This is part of the problem - I shouldn’t rely, as a user, on a third-party extension (which does who know what in my browser) to activate functionality that was already implemented and is intentionally kept away from users unless they enroll into MDM.

The first part is indeed annoying and part of Edge. (I agree doesn’t make sense)

But the second step is part of Chromium. Chrome shows the same alert for extensions changing the new tab page for the first time. (Which to me makes sense)

these lessons aren’t forgotten, we all just have a lot less power now as consumers. ms knows they are so large they can dictate the behavior of all users up to and including the regulatory bodies, all of which they’ve captured. stand up for your freedom, don’t use trash, don’t be the sucker, don’t be the product.

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