Still Feeling a Little Edgy (Premium)

I try to avoid Microsoft Edge as much as possible because the browser doesn't respect your privacy or choices, and it's saddled with feature bloat. But I also have a responsibility to understand what's happening with the browser, and I need to document how it works---and how to bypass or fix its many problems---for the Windows 11 Field Guide.

But this process is complicated by the many, many changes that Microsoft makes to Edge. In the past six months alone---I wrote most of the Edge content in the book last October and November---Edge has exploded with new functionality. Frankly, it’s getting a bit weird.

The first worrying sign of changes I'd need to make in the book came this past February when Microsoft surprised the world by suddenly announcing the AI-based Bing chatbot and two related capabilities in Edge: Chat and Compose. These features were added to the Discover page of the Edge Sidebar, which doesn't present much of a problem for the book. But Microsoft also added the hideous new blue Discover (Bing) button to the far right side of the Edge toolbar, past the Settings and more ("…") button. And that presented a problem for the book. A serious problem.

The issue here is that this is a major visual change, one that would impact most of the screenshots I took of the browser across the 7 chapters about Microsoft Edge (and in a few other places). So I would need to update literally hundreds of screenshots to account for this change, many of which require specific staging to get just right. Plus, cropping and other editing.

So I looked to see how much work this would entail.

Starting with the first Edge chapter, Set Up Microsoft Edge Correctly, I was surprised to find some other changes. The first being an offensive and problematic stage of initial setup, which Microsoft had titled "Let's make the web work for you," and I had correctly noted should really be called "Let's make the web work for Microsoft” because it's designed specifically to increase your usage of Microsoft online services and put your eyeballs in front of Microsoft advertising.

It has since been retitled to the less problematic "Help us make Microsoft experiences more useful to you," though the screen also explains less about what this change does. And so right up front, there was a pause. I would need to rewrite this bit as well. Interesting.

There were a few other changes to the content, but with that out of the way, I turned to the screenshots of the app window in that first chapter. Almost 20 had to be changed, and for the same two reasons: that damned blue Discover (Bing) button and the Sidebar, which had visually changed since I wrote the chapter.

And so I cheated. I'm lazy.

I created a mask of the Edge window at the 1920 x 1080 size I use for most screenshots that includes only the changed bits on the top right (Bing button) and right (Sidebar). Then I went through the chapter and pasted this mask over each screenshot that ne...