Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge, the default Windows 10 web browser, is not only fast and compliant with modern web standards, but it also offers some capabilities you won't find in the competition. Edge launched with interesting tools like webpage markup, integrated Cortana features, and a distraction-free Reading mode. Subsequent updates brought additional features, such as Tab Preview, Set Aside, extensions, and ebook reading. Even without these tricks, Edge is worth consideration, and it's mostly a pleasure to use. But Edge doesn't play well with some sites, and its extensions ecosystem is still small by comparison to more mature browsers.

Edge is stripped clean of the offending code that made Internet Explorer such a target for malware. It's free of ActiveX, browser helper objects, and VBScript support. Furthermore, Adobe Flash is now blocked by default. (You can allow it.) Edge uses the new EdgeHTML rendering engine instead of the maligned MSHTML, and the browser identifies itself to sites as compatible with the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It uses the new Chakra JavaScript engine, which more than holds its own when it comes to speed.

Getting Edge and Starting Up

There's just one way to get Edge: Upgrade your PC to Windows 10. Doing so installs Edge as your default browser. As with Safari on iOS and macOS, you can't uninstall Edge, but you can install any other browser you like and set that as your default. The browser is also the default on Windows 10 Mobile, and now you can install beta versions for iOS and Android. If you need Internet Explorer for a legacy site or intranet that requires it, Edge's menu includes an Open in Internet Explorer option. I tested Edge on a Surface Book with a Core i5 CPU and 8GB RAM.

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Before digging into all of Edge's abundant glories, here's a quick rundown of what's new for Edge with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update:

Read Webpages Aloud. This is useful for ebooks, which you can read in Edge, and also for long-form articles.

Annotate Books and PDFs. Highlight, underline, and jot margin notes just as you could in a paper book.

Pin Site Bookmarks to the Taskbar or Start Menu. This revives a feature that was in IE, but didn't make it to the early Edge releases.

Full Screen View. This one also was available in IE, as well as in versions of Edge on the Surface Hub, and should have been available in Edge from the start. You could always play videos full-screen, but now you can view any webpage that way.

Continue From Mobile. When you install the Continue on PC app on an iOS or Android devices, hitting the share icon lets you automatically open Edge to the page you're viewing on the mobile.

Even Faster JavaScript Performance. Edge already beat all other browsers on several benchmark tests, but for the Fall Creators Update, it gets even more JavaScript and memory optimizations.

More HTML5 Support. CSS Grid Layout and WebVR 1.1 WebAssembly, SharedArrayBuffer, and Atomics give web developers more options.

Edit Favorites URLs. Sometimes you save a favorite with a long specific address, but you just want the main site. A new right-click option lets you edit away.

A Little Fluent Design. The title bar and tab preview area now sport Acrylic transparency, part of Microsoft's updated Fluent Design System that's being gradually rolled out.

Interface

The overall design of Edge is clean and flat, with simple 2D controls whose functions are mostly obvious. Tabs are simply squared off, with arrows on the left for navigating back and forward, as well as a refresh button that is large and suitable for touch input. You can choose between light gray and dark (nearly black) interfaces. I prefer the latter because it puts the focus on the page rather than the browser frame. There are no fancy theme backgrounds like those available for Chrome and Firefox, though I suspect only a small minority use those options in any case.

At the right side of the combined address/search box are the rest of the controls. Inside the address bar, a book icon turns on Reading Mode; a star lets you add the current page to your Favorites and Reading List items. Clicking the Hub button, gives you access to Favorites, Reading List, History, Ebooks, and Downloads. The tools are rounded out with a Web Notes pen button, the Share button, and an overflow button (the … button) that opens more settings.

In a design choice that gives Edge perhaps the cleanest look of any browser, the address bar doesn't display at all if you use the search/address box in the middle of the Start/New Tab page. You simply navigate to the address without having to jump up to the address bar on the window border. The address bar takes on the same color as the rest of the toolbar until you tap or click on it, when it turns white like a traditional address box used in previous browsers. The Favorites bar doesn't appear unless you turn it on in Settings, and you can choose to show the Favorite site icons without text. You can also choose Paste-and-Go when pasting a URL from the clipboard, or Paste-and-Search for copied text—things I've been a fan of since the feature's first appearance in Opera.

Home and New Tab Page. The default Home page shows a newsfeed of the day's big events, the weather, your reading list items, your weather, sports teams' scores, stock portfolio quotes. A Home button is optional on the main toolbar. New tabs add a row of tiles linking to your most frequented sites. This default view is a lot more engaging and useful than a browser that just has a branded search box and nothing else on its new tab and home page. It's all customizable from a gear icon, and if you're not into Edge's default, you can simply start tabs with a blank page or any webpage of your choice.

Tab Pinning. If you right-click a site's tab and choose Pin, you can always have it ready for easy access, with a small square tab on the left side of the tab row. New for Windows 10 Fall Creators update is the ability to pin a site to the Taskbar or Start menu. You do this from a choice in the overflow menu rather than via right-click. The resulting button gets the site icon, rather than Edge's, which is helpful. Another convenience is the ability to right-click on the Back Arrow to see the last 10 pages viewed in the current tab.

New Tab Tricks. In Creators Update, Microsoft has done quite a bit with Edge's tabs, which is particularly helpful to those who keep lots of tabs open. The browser already showed thumbnail previews of your site tabs when you hover over them with the mouse, but now a down-caret button lets you show all the preview thumbs at once for easy skimming. I do wish that you could turn off the hover-over thumbnails, though, since they sometimes get in the way of browser control buttons.

The Set Aside icon at the top left lets you send the currently open group of tabs to the background. Just tap the window icon to its left to reopen the set, favorite them, or share them. The tab groups you've set aside remain available even after you shut down and restart Edge.

Tabs show a speaker icon when a background tab is playing audio, something pioneered by Chrome and helpful for tracking down noisy tabs. Unfortunately, you can't silence the tabs with a right-click, the way you can with Firefox's equivalent feature.

Have Edge Read Webpages Aloud. Starting with the Fall Creators Update, Edge can read any webpage aloud. This is great for when you have a long article to read but your eyes have had it with looking at the screen for the day. Just right-click anywhere on a page and choose Read aloud. The reading voice sounds surprisingly natural, too; it's not a monotonous robot voice, but uses varied intonation. You get three voice choices: Microsoft David, Zira, or Mark, and you can pause or skip forward and back paragraphs.

Books in Edge

Edge serves as the reader for Microsoft's new ebook initiative. The browser has long been able to display PDFs, but now you can buy (or get free) actual ebooks in the Microsoft Store. There's already a decent selection, with a good library of new releases free classics. I downloaded Dickens' Great Expectations, and it looked great on the high-res Surface Book display. You can also read a sample of a book before you buy it.

You access your bookshelf via the same icon that drops down Favorite, Reading List, History, and Downloads. Just like any other ebook reader, it lets you choose fonts (including publisher defaults), set bookmarks, view the table of contents, and search. You can also look up words with Cortana via right-click or tap-and-hold options.

One very cool option is that Edge can read the book aloud, in a selection of voice types, and with adjustable speed. As with any dedicated reader, for standard reading you can swipe back and forth through pages or tap the left or right side of the screen. But in a way, I still prefer a separate app for book-reading. For example, the Nook app that I use shows the exact page numbers, while in Edge (and Kindle) you only see a percent read. It's also preferable to have the bookstore in the same app as the reader.

Windows 10 Fall Creators Update added a couple of very desirable features to the ebook feature: Full screen view and the ability to mark up and add notes to books.

Extensions

An Extensions option in Edge's overflow menu links to the Windows app store, from which you can get extensions for the browser. I tested it by installing one I consider essential—LastPass—as well as the Internet-profit-model-killing AdGuard extension. There are also extensions for Adblock, Amazon, Evernote, Microsoft Translator, OneNote, Pinterest, Pocket, and more. Some recent additions include Dashlane, Grammarly, 1Password, and Norton Identity Safe.

At the time of this writing, there are 71 extensions. Though it's still not a long list, those are some heavy hitters that will make the browser appealing to more-demanding users. In a way, I like that the list seems highly vetted and useful, rather than being a free-for-all of unnecessary and sometimes risky choices in the much larger extension galleries. Thousands are available for Firefox and Chrome, by contrast.

Coding for IE's extensions uses the same web technologies as Chrome does (HTML and JavaScript), and Microsoft says converting existing Chrome extensions will be trivial. In fact, W3C members are working on a Browser Extension standard, which Microsoft aims to support.

Edge's Extensions don't show up in the toolbar as icons by default, but require you to either open the overflow menu, where you'll see your installed extensions at the top, or to right-click on a page to see an extension icon. In an extension's Settings panel, though, you can click on "Show button next to address bar" if you want to always have access to it. From that icon, the LastPass extension lets me do all the typical LastPass things—auto-filling username and password, generating a password, and filling forms.

Reading View

Reading View in Edge is similar to a feature found in Firefox and Safari, and it's a godsend with today's ad-infested web, especially if you're reading online news or information sites. You can choose from three looks in Settings: Light, Medium, and Dark. The last is great for night-time web reading when your eyes are nearly shot. There are also four font sizes to choose from, but you can zoom a Reading view page to any size you like.

Reading view is only available for article-style pages, and seeing those without ad pop-overs and auto-playing videos is very refreshing. You see its book icon animate, as if flipping through pages, when you land on a site that it works with. I actually prefer the way Firefox's similar feature works, though. You can control its appearance in similar ways with a slide-out left-control bar, saving you a trip to Settings. Unfortunately, some sites have gotten wise to Reading mode and disable the feature, and you can't use Read aloud in Reading view.

Reading List, Downloads, History

The Reading List feature has nothing to do with Reading mode or the e-book reader; instead, it's a second way to save sites you're interested in for later perusal. Choosing the Reading List icon instead of the star shows a thumbnail of the page you want to save. You can also save pages in your Reading List for offline viewing on the airplane.

To view your actual Reading List, you use the same three-line menu button you do for Favorites, History, and Downloads. The list of sites you marked shows thumbnail images, with a large thumbnail for the top item on the list. This panel is not the only place you see the list: You also see it on the browser's useful New-Tab page. The feature could be very useful if you read long articles that require more than a single sitting.

The Downloads panel works as similar features in other browsers do. You get an indication here if a download is suspect. One of my downloaded files was followed by, in red type, the message "This program is not commonly downloaded and could harm your computer."

You can view visited sites from the last hour, today, yesterday, last week, or older. Something I miss here, though, is the ability to search within your history, and there's no full history window like that offered by Firefox. But if you start typing part of a page title in the address bar, it drops down in the address bar's list of visited sites.

Cortana Integration

This is one of my favorite things about using Edge. Most browsers let you search based on selected text with a right-click option, but Edge puts a twist on this, with Cortana integration. When you right-click on selected text, you see an Ask Cortana choice, and instead of opening a new search page, you see a sidebar with a definition, photos, or relevant web results, often from Wikipedia. Not having to switch tabs is a real boon over the course of a day.

The Cortana integration takes another form, too. Sometimes she suggests a modern Windows app if there's one for the site you're viewing. She can also offer directions and a menu if you land on a restaurant website, or a coupon if you're on a shopping site.

Cortana in Edge can also find information on photos. Just right-click a photo on a webpage, and the service can sometimes find facts on the photo and related images.

Web Notes

Have you ever wanted to share or save a webpage with markup and comments? Web Notes may be Edge's flashiest feature, and it is cool, but I must confess that I haven't used it much in the real world. That may just be a matter of learning a new behavior instead of simply using my Snagit hotkey for all screen capturing. To get started, you tap or click the pen-and-selection-box icon. This turns the top browser border purple and adds several markup tools: a pen, a highlighter, an eraser, a note box, and a clipping tool. Each of these works fine with a mouse, but it's more fun to use your finger with them on a touch screen.