New user to Edge thoughts.

Copper Contributor

I've been a Chrome user for more than a decade and love the way its ecosystem works between windows and android.  But, I am growing tire of Google's political censoring and its tracking policy that it doesn't follow. So, I decided to give this new Edge browser a shot. I like it.

 

Using Chrome's open-source code is a huge plus. I can still use my favorite apps. The voice search is a lot better than Chrome. But Bing's search is still not as good. I also like the Read Mode. I am sure there is more to discover.

 

New Tab:

  • The tab opening to MSN is good and being able to customize the news feed is great.  This was extremely important for me, the default feed for me was awful. I usually have Yahoo as my default home page since its news feed is more balance. But, I can't customize it like I can on Edge MSN.
  • I wish the option to choose which "Quick Links" I want and lock them down. 
  • I tried changing the search engine to Google but the microphone disappear. I found this weird since if I open Google.com in a tab the microphone is available.
  • Shopping in Edge app seems better than Honey. I like the way it searches the internet. But I would like to control its notifications. The popups when I am on shopping site is annoying. I would prefer a blinking or glowing action on that sales tag icon. Even a sound would be good.

I think I should mention I am 57 yr, old tech guy. I come from a time of dial-up. I used Netscape, IE, Firefox, and more browsers. I predate Google when you had to use 5+ search engines to find what you want.

3 Replies

@johnl12 Hello, Glad to  see you're using the new  microsoft edge, and

Welcome to the Microsoft edge (insider) community!

I would like to comment some of your points:

- You can change your new tab page with extensions on the microsoft edge addons store (Microsoft Edge Addons)

- You can choose special pages to open when you start the browser (google for example, or yahoo or others) in settings > start, home, new tab > add your own pages.

- The microphone on new tab only works using bing as search engine, but maybe there are extensions to use voice search with google... (you can send feedback about your "sad" issue with three dots menu > help and feedbcak > send feedback)

- For the fourth point, you should also send feedback to the dev team

 

And finally, as you said, you have a lot of things to discover ! (You can enable some options with edge://flags in the search bar on the top, but they are flags, with maybe some problems)

 

 

Thank you for sharing your feedbacks, you may easily set the Google as your default browser.
Microsoft Edge team welcomes feedbacks, you may press Alt+Shift+I in Microsoft Edge and open feedback option and share your feedbacks with the Microsoft Edge team.

@Tio_Dep 

Many moons ago Bill Gates was once asked why he doesn't document all the features of Windows. He stated he wanted the users to have the

'joy of discovery." I say BS, his programmers added a lot of tools to make what they need to do easier and just didn't remove them. I am not complaining as a sysadmin those tools are great once you find them.