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By default, Internet Explorer uses a live website (or several ones, since IE supports multiple homepages). For the new tab page, it uses a search box and a list of your most frequently visited sites. Both of these can be set to a blank page. For as long as I can remember, Internet Explorer has supported the special URL (web address) of "about:blank". Instead of something that starts with "http://" or "https://", simply typing about:blank in the address bar and hitting Enter will load a blank page. That's what we'll use in this tutorial.
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Once in Internet Explorer 11/10/9, click on the Tools menu (gear icon in the top right corner of the window), or hit the corresponding Alt+X keyboard shortcut. Click on the "Internet options" menu near the bottom, and make sure that the "General" settings tab is selected in the dialog that opened.
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To set your homepage to a blank page: select and delete all the text you see in the text box labeled "To create home page tabs, type each address on its own line". Type "about:blank" in that text box instead. If that's all you wanted to do, you are done. Click on the OK button to save your new settings.
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To set the new tab screen to a blank page, click on the Tabs button in the Options dialog you have opened. In the "When a new tab is opened, open:" dropdown menu, pick "A blank page" instead of the current option.
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Bonus Tip: in the Tabs options popup, if the "Enable Tab Groups" checkbox is checked, a new tab always opens on next to the current one. If you uncheck it (this is how you disable colored tabs in Internet Explorer by the way :), you can uncheck "Open each new tab next to the current tab", so that new tabs will now load at the very end (rightmost spot) of your row of tabs.
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Click OK to save that option, and OK once more to return to Internet Explorer. Hit the Alt+Home keyboard shortcut to load your new homepage: it should show a blank page, with "about:blank" in the address bar. Now test the new tab page by hitting Ctrl+T - it should also be a blank page!