Whatever your motivations it is possible to remove inprivate browsing from the new Edge browser in Windows 10.
Employers may want to stop time wasting, parents may be looking to protect children and see who they’ve been spending time with online. Inprivate mode opens up a whole host of potential issues and some may prefer to disable it.
In earlier browsers you would use a group policy to stop this, so far in Edge we have to add a registry key to perform this task.
ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR REGISTRY BEFORE MAKING CHANGES TO IT.
In the run/search box, type regedit and press return.
The registry editor will open.
Navigate through to find the following entry
HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Policies\Microsoft\MicrosoftEdge\Privacy
You will probably need to add MicrosoftEdge and Privacy, if they are there just follow the instructions from that point onwards.
Find Microsoft under Policies, click it once to select it and press the right mouse button. Select new key, type MicrosoftEdge into the name for this key
Right click the MicrosoftEdge key and create a new key named Privacy.
Now select Privacy key and right click and create a new DWORD label the DWORD EnableInPrivateBrowsing and give it a value of 0
Now restart your computer and when you click EnableInPrivateBrowsing in edge nothing will happen.
UPDATE 21/12/2015 thanks to reader JM.
There was a change to windows 10 so if this doesn’t work follow the instructions below…
HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\MicrosoftEdge\
Create a Main subcategory after this so it reads, HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\MicrosoftEdge\Main
Then add the dword AllowInPrivate to Main and set the value to 0
Restart your computer for this setting to take place and Inprivate will no longer be selectable.
Thanks for the post. It’s a shame that Microsoft doesn’t provide a way for an administrator to do this easily without having to dive down into the registry.
I have just upgraded to Windows 10 home (64 bit). I added a registry entry as you suggested, restarted my pc but I can still open an inprivate browsing window. Any ideas why this isn’t working for me?! I had disabled inprivate mode on Internet Explorer by adding a very similar registry entry, just under a folder named Internet Explorer and wondered if the space made a difference, so I did also try calling the folder Microsoft Edge with a space between the two words. This didn’t work either…
I couldn’t get the above to work but did manage to disable inprivate browsing under HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\MicrosoftEdge\Main dword AllowInPrivate value 0
This worked for me… thank you for the edit. Hard to find solution because everything else in dated or the wrong version(s). Win10 Home, Edge…. No GPEdit, No old Regedit hacks works.