How to Disable the Surf Game in Microsoft Edge?

Microsoft Edge has included a surfing themed game for users that is similar to Chrome’s Dino runner. This game can be played when the user is offline or by navigating to edge://surf. However, in environments like a company or school, this can be a distraction or not needed. As an administrator, you may want to disable this game from the browser of the employee’s computer. In this article, we will be showing you methods through which you can easily disable this game from the Microsoft Edge browser.

Surf Game in Microsoft Edge

Users can now play a surfing themed game in the Microsoft Edge browser after build 83.0.478.37. The game was inspired by the class Windows game SkiFree and comes with three distinct game modes. For some environments, it can be pretty fun, but for others just a bad feature. Depending on the situation the user can always enable or disable this game in their Edge browser. This can be done by the Registry or Group Policy tools.

Disabling Surf Game through the Registry Editor

This method can be applied to every Windows 10 operating system. It is a bit technical, but not so hard to configure the setting in the Registry. You will have to create the missing key or value for this setting in the Registry Editor. By following the below steps correctly, you can easily disable the surf game in the Microsoft Edge browser.

Note: We also recommend users to create a backup of Registry whenever they try to make any new changes.

1. Hold the Windows key and press R on your keyboard to open the Run dialog box. Here type “regedit” and press the Enter key to open the Registry Editor. If prompted by User Account Control (UAC) dialog, then choose the Yes option.

   

2. In the Registry Editor’s Local Machine hive, navigate to the following key:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge

3. If the Edge key is missing under the Microsoft key, then right-click on the Microsoft key and choose the New > Key option. Name the newly created key as “Edge“.

   

4. Right-click on the right pane of the Edge key and choose the New > DWORD (32-bit) Value option. This will create a new value and you can name this value as “AllowSurfGame“.

   

5. Now open the value by double-clicking on it and change the value data to 0.
   Note: The value data will be 0 by default, but if it isn’t then you can simply change it to 0. The value data 0 is for disabling.

   

6. Finally, when you are done with all the above steps, make sure you restart the computer to apply these changes.
7. You can always enable back the Surf game by changing the value data to 1 or simply removing the value from the Registry Editor.

Disabling Surf Game through the Group Policy Editor

The Group Policy configuration is always much easier than the Registry configuration. However, for this specific task, the policy setting for the latest Microsoft Edge may not be available in your Group Policy Editor. You have to download the policy files for the latest Edge browser and then copy those files. It has more steps than the Registry method.

1. First of all, you have to download the latest Group Policy files for the latest Microsoft Edge. Select the version, build, platform, and then click on the “GET POLICY FILES“.

   

2. The downloaded file will be a RAR file, so extract the file to a folder by using the WinRAR as shown below:

   

3. Inside this folder you need to navigate to the following folder:

   MicrosoftEdgePolicyTemplates\windows\admx

4. Now you need to copy “msedge.admx” and the “msedge.adml” file (which can be found inside one of the following language folders) and paste these files into the “C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions” folder.

   

   Note: The language file is copied to the language folder of your system.

5. You might need to restart your system to see these new policies in your Group Policy Editor. Sometimes it takes a while to appear in there.
6. You can open the Group Policy Editor by opening the Run dialog box and typing “gpedit.msc” in it.

   

7. Navigate to the new Microsoft Edge under the Computer Configuration category:

   Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Microsoft Edge\

   

8. Open the setting named “Allow surf game” by double-clicking on it. Now here you need to change the toggle option to Disabled.

   

9. Click on the Apply/Ok button to save the changes to your system. Now the Surf game will be disabled in Microsoft Edge.
10. You can always enable it back by changing the toggle option back to Enabled or Not Configured in step 8.