Enabling multiple Home tabs in Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 build 10158

At Build this year, we had a chance to meet with some Microsoft engineers in a press mixer (the one where Joe Belfiore announced that Windows 10 Mobile would ship later than the July 29th Windows 10 release date), and I chatted with an old acquaintance from the IE team, Jason Webber. Jason has been meeting with the press in events like these since back in the days of Steven Sinofsky and Dean Hachamovitch and IE 9, and we’ve talked a number of times before.

This time, I was commiserating about the loss of multiple home tabs in Spartan/Edge, something I use daily.  He told me that “less than 1%” of IE users took the time to set them up, and that they probably wouldn’t make it back into the final versions of Edge.

So I was pleasantly surprised last night to find that a version of multiple home page tabs has found its way into Edge.  Maybe that 1% of users are all Windows Insiders, or perhaps my cajoling at the Build press event worked (yeah right).  Anyway, here’s how you can set up multiple home pages in tabs on Microsoft Edge in build 10158

First, open Edge and click on the three ellipsis (why doesn’t this icon have a cool name, like hamburger?), choose “Open with… a specific page or pages”, and fill in the web addresses of the sites you want to set your homepages:

Edge Home Page Setup

There’s no “save”, just keep adding new home pages until you’re done.  At the same time, you can set the new tab behavior. Aside from “blank page”, you can choose “Top sites” which gives you the familiar set of boxes to choose from:

or you can choose to have “Top sites with suggested content”, which opens the same tab set with added MSN content:

Edge Top Sites

Edge Top sites with content

There still isn’t an option to “open the first tab only”, which I became quite fond of using as it allowed for opening the browser quickly, with my beloved home pages only a click away. Filling in the home page tabs manually isn’t quite as simple as setting the pages and then choosing “use the current tab set”, but sometimes that was more trouble than it was worth, having to get all the pages just right before saving.

As Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge head toward the July 29th finish line, they’re both getting more polished, and it was a pleasant surprise to see multiple home page tabs make the cut.  What feature or features are you still missing from Edge?