“You’ve opened a new tab” annoyance on IE7
Technology January 31st, 2007 It’s annoying to see the following page everytime I open a new tab window on IE7. Even after I check the “Don’t show this page again” checkbox, it is still opening a new tab with this annoying “You’ve opened a new tab” tab.

How do I turn this off to just show my blank home page?
Open the registry by going to Start -> Run -> Type regedit
Look for the following registry
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TabbedBrowsing

Right click on the right window and open a new DWORD value.

Give the name “ShowTabsWelcome“, and right click to modify the value. Make sure is shows 0.

Now open a new tab in IE7, the annoying “You’ve opened a new tab” page is gone!
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11 Responses to ““You’ve opened a new tab” annoyance on IE7”
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October 18th, 2007 at 7:53 am
Instead of going through all that registry editing, try this:
How do I open a new tab to my home page?
By default, Internet Explorer displays the Welcome to tabbed browsing page or a blank page when you open a new tab by clicking the New tab button or by pressing CTRL + T. If you prefer that your home page appear when you open a new tab, follow these steps.
To display the home page on new tabs
1. Open Internet Explorer by clicking the Start button , and then clicking Internet Explorer.
2. Click the Tools button, and then click Internet Options.
3. Click the General tab, and then, under Tabs, click Settings.
4. In the Tabbed Browsing Settings dialog box, select the Open home page for new tabs instead of a blank page check box, and then click OK twice.
Notes:
–If you open a new tab and see a page that says “You’ve opened a new tab” after you’ve followed the steps above, select the Don’t show this page again check box, and then click Close. When you restart Internet Explorer, your home page will display whenever you open a new tab.
–If you have multiple home page tabs, only the first home page in your list will open in the new tab.
October 18th, 2007 at 8:00 am
@Mike:
Thank you for the information. The reason why I choose to use registry is that after installing IE7, there were something broken in the system. So the process you mentioned above won’t work. I don’t really know what was broken so the message is always showing. However, I do know that the registry setting was missing.
November 19th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
I had this exact same problem. The registry setting fixed it. And like you, even though I had the correct settings in the IE options, it would still show the Welcome to Tabbed Browsing page.
Under my wife’s user account, I also had an issue where IE7 would not accept a change to the default search engine in the Quick Search box. A registry edit fixed that problem too. I recently reformatted, and this was the first time I have ever ran into these issues.
Thank you for the information.
November 19th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
@Civisi:
Thank you for stopping by! I am glad that you solve the problem. You seem like Microsoft stuff a lot. How come you are using gmail?
November 20th, 2007 at 4:17 am
Yes, I am very much a Microsoft person. I’m a network engineer, so I work with Microsoft products all day. I like the inter-connectivity between the software and services.
I switched to Gmail (from Yahoo) because (1) of all the spam I was getting at my Yahoo address, (2) all of the free accounts at the time only had 250 MB or so of storage, whereas Gmail was up to 1 GB, and (3) Gmail had POP access, which allowed me to use Outlook. (This was before the Outlook-Hotmail connector). I had a hotmail account at the time, but it was getting clobbered with spam, so I never used it. The hotmail account I have now is my primary Live ID account, and I don’t want spam there, so I created a difficult-to-guess email address and I never give out the address. That way, it will never get spam.
Now that I have the Outlook/Hotmail connector, I created an @live.com email address that I will use more in the future for my blogging needs. However, my biggest limitation with the Outlook/Hotmail connector is that I can’t create Subfolders to organize my email, which I really use.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:25 am
@Civisi:
The first day I got my terencechang hotmail account, I got over 100 spam emails. Ever since then, I only use it for MSN. I like Yahoo now, because it providss unlimited space and I have used Yahoo mail since they started beta program back in early 1998.
Gmail handle all spam mail very well. However, I have never give out my gmail account. I don’t know why there are over 100 spam email in my spam folder everyday. So it doesn’t make difference between Yahoo mail. I like the POP3 features on Gmail too. I now use Yahoo web mail all the time, since I use the Yahoo messenger built-in Yahoo mail to communicate with friends. I also use Yahoo Voice service to call friends and families in other countries.
I don’t really get used to Live space and all other Live services. It’s very slow. The only two products I use are Live Writer for blog and Messenger Live. They are both great services.
Thanks!
January 28th, 2008 at 9:02 am
I don’t know about you, but I actually LIKE the you’ve opened a new tab thing, and I had to uninstall a toolbar which messed it up, so I reverse-engineered the tip and changed the 0 to 1 to show it again.
January 29th, 2008 at 2:42 am
@Mike Leung:
That’s interesting. I find the notification annoying. I know I am going to open a new tab. Just let me go there.
I am glad that you find the solutions. Thank you for stopping by.
May 21st, 2008 at 4:32 pm
I have to say thanks to the regedit tip… the subkey was missing so I had to create it, and now everything works just fine, I have been so annoyed about this tab thing I was about to abandon IE7 and go back to Opera, like I use on my BlackJack, the only thing I wish we could “hack” into IE7 would be a “speed-dial” like in Opera. So my hat is off to you Terence Chang, you are my new IE hero!!!
May 21st, 2008 at 4:49 pm
@Kirbee:
I am glad that you got the problem solved. Have you tried FireFox browser? I don’t like Opera personally. Firefox has a lot more add-ons to help my web surfing. Thank you for stopping by!
May 21st, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Yes I have had the chance to use Firefox, but not very extensively. I did use the Opera browser for the built-in torrent engine, pop3 mail integration, widgets, speed-dial, and security. I did not give Firefox much of a chance, therefore I might have missed some key features, I will take a gander at the site and see what I did miss, but I would like to talk more about the two browsers email me since you are a mod and can see email addy’s…