Feeling a Little Edgy (Premium)

I’ve successfully ignored Microsoft Edge for the past few years, but I’m writing a Windows 11 book and so it was time to get my hands dirty. And … wow.

Just, wow.

I thought I understood that Microsoft had been jamming more and more features into Microsoft Edge, but you don’t really understand what’s happened until you experience it. And, in my case, having purposefully ignored Edge for so long really helped drive home what’s changed: if I had been using Edge all along, the steady drone of new might have simply seemed like normal evolution. But coming back to it a few years later was shocking.

Looking back at what I wrote about Microsoft Edge in the Windows 10 Field Guide is alternatively amusing and alarming. “Microsoft Edge … offers a streamlined user experience with tabbed browsing, an address bar with integrated search, and mostly-obvious access to common browser functions,” I wrote at the time.

No more. Today, Microsoft Edge is the antithesis of Windows 11, a bloated product that doesn’t seem designed so much as just bolted onto so much that it no longer resembles its original vision. It’s the web browser version of somehow who is addicted to plastic surgery and just doesn’t know when to stop.

Looking over the Microsoft Edge chapter in the Windows 10 Field Guide, I see only a few features—like Collections–that differentiate this product, functionally, from Google Chrome or other web browsers. And of course some interesting ecosystem support like Microsoft account and ALT+TAB integration. The rest of it is simply familiar, which makes sense given what Microsoft was trying to achieve in the shift to Edge’s Chromium underpinnings.

Today, that is no longer the case.

Instead, Edge assaults you with complexity from the moment of its very first launch, when you are given a bizarre range of nonsensical choices. The very first screen you see tells you that Edge is “almost set up,” and an option titled “Stay up to date by regularly bringing in your browsing data” is auto-selected and, I gotta be honest here, I’m not sure what that even means. (I assume it’s related to the syncing of data through your Microsoft account.) In the next screen, you’re prompted to sign into your “Google browser,” whether Chrome is installed or not, so you can import bookmarks, history, and other data from that account into what Microsoft hopes will be the browser you now use instead. And then you’re given the most insidious choice of all, to “Make your Microsoft experience more useful to you” by auto-configuring back-end search, shopping, news, and advertising services to Microsoft’s preferences. The sheer gall of that is incredible, especially given the lack of explanation.

But it continues. You’re then prompted, in turn, to express yourself with a theme and pin some Microsoft and partner web apps to your Taskbar, which is interesting. And then you’re dumped into the Edge new tab experience, which—wait for it—is another busy mess of MSN and Bing content just waiting for you to figure out how to turn it off (or, better yet, install a replacement like Momentum).

Which isn’t a bad introduction to Edge, frankly. Because you’re going to spend a lot of time turning off features that you don’t want or need, features that very often offer very little in the way of plausible justification. But I can help: you need to think like Microsoft here. These features and presets aren’t here to make your life better. They’re here to further Microsoft’s aims.

It starts with the new sidebar, which displays as a pixel-hogging column of icons on the right side of the browser by default. It’s easy enough to disable—just click the little “Hide sidebar” icon near its bottom—but I, of course, slowly stepped through its various options slack-jawed, as if I were driving by a particularly gruesome car crash. A Search bar provides yet another way to search with Bing, the search engine no one uses on purpose. A Discover bar subverts the site you’re currently visiting by offering you links to other similar sites. (Thurrott’s choices today were OnMSFT, Droid Life, and, God damn it, Daring Fireball.) A Tools bar is perhaps the most humorous: it contains a world clock, a calculator, a dictionary, a translator, a unit converter, and an Internet speed test, all things one can easily access without using this interface. And a Games bar provides the saddest-looking collection of casual games I’ve seen outside of a WildTangent crapware bundle.

Two of the sidebar items—Office and Outlook—will indeed be useful to the heavy Microsoft user, and the only confusing thing about their appearance here is that they’re at the bottom of the list and not at the top. But again, these are items one can easily access on the web normally.

But the goofiest thing about the sidebar is that it’s not the only Edge “bar”: Microsoft’s browser also offers a feature called—wait for it—the Edge bar that brings yet another Widgets-like experience to the Windows desktop, complete with weather, crappy news stories, and its own weird list of tabs that doesn’t line up exactly with what’s available in the sidebar. But the Edge bar can sit on the screen all the time and isn’t found inside the Edge browser. So I guess it’s a different thing, sort of. (Microsoft: Seriously, combine these features.)

Edge is a weird web browser. It includes throwbacks to the Internet Explorer past, like its renaming of bookmarks to favorites. There’s a time-wasting default “Save as” experience for downloads. You can cast media to other displays, but only via Miracast, which is unreliable and ill-supported, and not to Google Cast/Chromecast-compatible displays. Plumb the depths of its insanely huge menu and you’ll find crazy little tools like “Cite this” and “Math Solver” (yes, with those inconsistent capitalizations).

It also offers that Collections feature that provides yet another way to save information, but in this case in a way that is incompatible with your other devices … unless you use Edge, of course. And it offers very prominent tracking protection features that I found out long ago do absolutely nothing to stop you from being tracked online. Why? Because Microsoft sells ads online, that’s why.

And Microsoft seems a lot more concerned about saving energy than providing you with a good browsing experience. As a weird hybrid desktop/UWP app, Edge takes advantage of modern power management features not provided to other browsers, like Efficiency Mode, and it will sleep unused tabs by default to save RAM, but that makes accessing them a lot slower. I hate it.

Point being, if you’re interested in actually using this browser, you will spend a lot of time disabling things you don’t want and a lot more time trying to find what should be obvious settings to change. Consider the search engine, which you will want to reconfigure the first time you type a search phrase into the address bar and the Bing logo appears, as unwanted as the Eye of Sauron. I’ll spare you the drama: this option is configured via Edge settings > Privacy, search, and services > Services > Address bar and search, which, quite literally is the very last option on a very, very long page of options. It’s almost like they hid it on purpose, like an evil version of Where’s Waldo. OK, not almost.

If Microsoft is trying to turn Edge into a platform akin to Teams, or perhaps more akin to Chrome OS, where it may one day be used alongside, or perhaps in competition with, Windows, then it’s moving in the right direction. But as a browser, Edge is so busy and so top-heavy with dubious features that it should simply be avoided by most. And that sucks: I still like the idea of a stripped-down version of Chrome without all the Google stuff.

It’s too bad that’s not what Edge is anymore.