Taming Microsoft Edge - Setting a corporate intranet page as start page and home page via GPO

Microsoft Edge – love it or hate it, it’s part of the Windows world, and one we all need to accept as an annoying aspect of building SOE images. 

As anyone who knows how our end users know, most users don’t actually realise that newly styled ‘E’ on their taskbar is actually edge, not a refreshed icon for IE.

Recently, it became apparent that while I had not planned that our end users would use edge, they still do!

So, I had to work out a way to set the homepage at a GPO level to our local intranet. Seems simple – there’s bound to be a GPO for that – wrong!

For whatever reason, you can set the start page via GPO to any website you’d like via the Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Microsoft Edge > Configure Start Pages GPO – and this works – when you launch Edge, sure enough your so-called ‘start page’ directs to your site of choice.

However, the moment you click on the ‘Home Button’ you get redirected to msn.com - such a great look!

After a day scouring various forums, I saw references to setting up a registry preferences in GPO – testing these gave no results. 

After further testing, and manually setting the reference on a fresh build, and monitoring the systems registry, I have found a workable solution.

I set a registry preference in my customizations GPO at the following location 

Computer Configuration > Preferences > Registry.

In this case, used the registry wizard to capture the settings from my donor machine, but the details of the required change are below:

Name: HomeButtonPage

Action: Replace

Hive: HKEY_USERS

Key: S-1-5-21-590214849-648453834-769943335-10778_Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\AppContainer\Storage\microsoft.microsoftedge_8wekyb3d8bbwe\MicrosoftEdge\Main

Value Type: REG_SZ

Value data:<your custom URL>
  

Now combine this fix, with the above GPO for the start page, and finally Edge starts to behave itself, and ‘appear’ suitable for a corporate SOE image.