How To Control The Restore Pages Prompt In Microsoft Edge Microsoft Edge can sometimes surprise users with a “Restore pages?” prompt after a crash or unexpected shutdown. It’s a helpful feature for recovering tabs, but in shared or kiosk environments, it can also be a privacy risk. Let’s walk through how to enable or disable this dialog to keep Edge behavior consistent across devices. Before we begin, be sure to subscribe to NinjaOne's IT Video Hub and our YouTube channel for more tech content like this. Why Controlling The Prompt Matters When Edge crashes, it can reopen all previously visited tabs the next time it starts. While this is great for personal devices, it can cause problems in public or multi-user setups by exposing sensitive data or restoring sessions unintentionally. Controlling this behavior ensures every browser launch starts clean, especially in enterprise or kiosk environments. How To Manage The Restore Pages Dialog With Group Policy For organizations running Windows 11 Enterprise, Group Policy offers the fastest and most centralized control. After installing Microsoft Edge ADMX templates, open the Group Policy Editor and navigate to: Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Edge. Look for Hide Restore pages dialog after a browser crash and set it to Enabled to suppress the prompt or Disabled to allow recovery. Apply the policy, then run gpupdate /force to make the change system-wide. Using Registry Editor For Individual Systems If you’re managing a smaller setup or using Windows Home, you can use the Registry Editor instead. Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\ Microsoft\Edge Create a new DWORD value named HideRestoreDialogEnabled Set it to 1 to disable the prompt or 0 to enable it. Restart Edge for the change to take effect. Additional Tips For Stable Behavior Edge’s built-in settings under edge://settings/onStartup let you control normal startup behavior but not crash recovery. For true consistency, use Group Policy or the Registry. These methods ensure predictable results and cleaner sessions across shared, kiosk, and enterprise environments. For more information, check out our official blog post on configuring the Microsoft Edge restore pages prompt linked in the description below.