URL for New Tab Page on Edge not showing in Address Bar on 365 sites when navigating to different pages

Question

Hi, is there any further info on how the address bar works with a URLs on the New Tab Page?

My organisation uses the "Configure the new tab page URL" policy in Edge to point to an intranet site (running IE Mode) so that staff can access our intranet by just opening a new tab. We're moving to a new intranet site in SharePoint (i.e. not in IE Mode) and we've noticed that when open a new tab, the URL doesn't appear in the address bar. This behaviour is fine (it appears to happen with all sites), but when we click onto different pages in the SharePoint site, any subsequent pages do not display this URL either.

This seems to only be affecting 365 sites (e.g. SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, M365 Admin Center), but not other sites (e.g. Google, learn.microsoft.com, admx.help) -- those other (non-365) sites load the URL when navigating to new pages on their site.

Does anyone know if this is the intended behaviour for these types of sites, or if there is any further documentation that I can read about the new tab page policies to stop this behaviour?

Best case scenario for us would be to have the URL display in the address bar after clicking on a new SharePoint page (i.e. how those non-365 sites function); they want staff to have the ability to copy the URL from any page so that they can send to other staff via email/Teams, so they want the URL visible on all pages within the SharePoint site. Since this is something that we're deploying to our staff, we can't deploy an extension for them to configure themselves (I've been told that the end users should be able to do this without configuring anything on their end).

I can't seem to find any information at all about this, so I'm hoping someone has an answer!

Answer 1

Hi @Michael ,

After some investigation, I've got some findings that I'd like to share with you.

1. The behaviour of hiding the URL of a new tab is by design, mainly driven by security concerns, such as Start Page or New Tab Page spoofing.
2. I tried SharePoint, and not all subsequent pages hid their URL when navigated to. But in Outlook, I failed to find any subsequent page displaying its URL. Also, Gmail behaved in the same way.

Since you've said end users shouldn't worry about it, I have 2 workarounds for you:

1. Replace New Tab with Home Page. Users won't have their home page URL hidden. To configure the home page URL, please configure this policy: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-policies#homepagelocation
2. Try adding the target site to your Favorites, which is one-click away just like users opening a new tab.

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Best Regards,
Shijie Li