Microsoft Edge can be configured using the settings page at edge://settings. However, some settings are not available in the UI. For instance, you cannot replace the new tab page; you can only configure its content. This means you are stuck with the Edge-branded page showing news and other content you may not want. Fortunately, Microsoft Edge supports configuration through policies. There are multiple ways to apply a policy, but if you only need to configure Edge on your own machine, you can use the registry directly.
PowerShell
New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge" -Name "NewTabPageLocation" -Value "about:blank" -PropertyType String -Force
If you use a dark theme, you can set the background color to black using the following registry value. The page content is <style>*{background:rgb(51,51,51)}</style>, encoded as base64:
PowerShell
$content = "<style>*{background:rgb(51,51,51)}</style>"
$byte_array = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($content)
$base64 = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String($byte_array) # PHN0eWxlPip7YmFja2dyb3VuZDpyZ2IoNTEsNTEsNTEpfTwvc3R5bGU+
New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge" -Name "NewTabPageLocation" -Value "data:text/html;charset=utf-8;base64,$base64" -PropertyType String -Force
You may need to reload the policy by restarting Edge or using the edge://policy page.
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