TL;DR
To change the New Tab Page Location in Microsoft Edge juste apply these registry settings
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
; # Fake MDM-Enrollment - Key 1 of 2 - let a Win10-11 Machine "feel" MDM-Managed
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Enrollments\FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF]
"EnrollmentState"=dword:00000001
"EnrollmentType"=dword:00000000
"IsFederated"=dword:00000000
; # Fake MDM-Enrollment - Key 2 of 2 - let a Win10-11 Machine "feel" MDM-Managed
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Provisioning\OMADM\Accounts\FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF]
"Flags"=dword:00d6fb7f
"AcctUId"="0x000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
"RoamingCount"=dword:00000000
"SslClientCertReference"="MY;User;0000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
"ProtoVer"="1.2"
; # NewTabPageLocation Policy
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge\Recommended]
"NewTabPageLocation"="https://www.google.com"
You can check the policy in Edge at the url edge://policy/
First I saw some Extension to change the New Tab Page but I don’t want to trust an extension for that :( and in this article a comment talk about a NewTabPageLocation policy ! Searching this policy on Google I came accross this very nice hack from Gunnar Haslinger.
“Edge Policies for non-Domain-joined Devices…” By Gunnar Haslinger
Microsoft page to check all the policies available for Microsoft Edge https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-policies
Warning notes from the article :
Side-Effect: Defender Tamper Protection turned off on MDM-managed Devices …
… I’m not aware of any side effects on Windows Defender/Security. Just re-tested to turn off Windows Defender Real-time protection: works as expected. I tried both common methods, interactively by mouse-clicking in Start -> “Windows Security” as well as using the Powershell
Set-MpPreference -DisableRealtimeMonitoring $true