82: Browsing, Collecting and Sharing

Posted on June 27, 2025 (Updated June 26, 2025) by ewand

Following last week’s vaguely Viz-themed missive on Tabs, we’ll expand a bit on the organization of browser tabs.

Edging ahead

Microsoft decided to sunset the ageing Internet Explorer browser with a new one for Windows 10, built on more modern core technologies and codenamed “Project Spartan” (when naming things after Halo characters was all the rage). This new “Edge” browser had some very nice functionality ideas, and the hope was that it would usher in a new era of performance, stability and security, at least compared to IE. In truth, it was slow, resource intensive and a bit flaky. Not all websites worked with it either, since developers would test their sites with browser versions which people actually used already.

A few years later, when Microsoft decided to ditch its in-house rendering engine efforts and move Edge onto the same core as Chrome, that meant that Edge could be every bit as compatible as Chrome but potentially differentiate with features the Google browser didn’t offer. Edge has arguably better tab arrangement and privacy controls, but Chrome has 10x the user base: let’s not get bogged down with which is better and why. There are plenty articles out there to offer their opinions.

Collections

One of those spangly new features that was part of the pre-Chromium Edge was the ability to “set aside” tabs; a step up from adding that site to Favo(u)rites, where you’d see a thumbnail of the tab when viewing the ones you’d decided to come back to later. This still sits, 7 years later, with a variety of other pretty neat features (like annotations) which have yet to make it across to the new Chromium version, or at least not to the same fidelity.

The nearest Edge/Chromium has to this tab set-aside feature is Collections.

You may see the icon of a Plus sign on your browser toolbar; if not, delve into Settings or possibly even look under More tools to either access it or pin it to the toolbar by right-clicking on the menu option.

Collections let you group sites/tabs together by topic, add notes to individual tiles or the whole collection, and they sync across multiple PCs using your Microsoft Account or work/school account (aka Entra ID). They even sync to the mobile versions of Edge for iOS and Android, if you’re committed enough to be using that too.

As well as providing a nice way of grouping sites and giving you pinned notes to serve as a personal aide-mémoire, Collections lets you quickly open the tabs in one action, so if you like to keep together several property searches, financial reports, product research pages etc, then it’s easy. You can share the tabs (including your notes) by copying them all to the clipboard as text and links, ready for sending on.

Working together

So far, we have Tab Groups that can be named and more-or-less persisted; there’s Collections which does much the same thing but with a bit more organisation. Collections is specific to Edge, whereas Tab Groups kind-of comes with the Chromium package so is common with other browsers too.

Now, the latest Edge-specific way of grouping tabs is Workspaces.

The idea here is to group tabs that you’re using or working with, and share them with other people – again, using Microsoft Account or work/school ID, so they can collaborate too. Like Collections, Workspaces will sync across different PCs using the same login, but they are not yet supported on mobile versions of Edge.

In practice, when you click a Workspace to open it up, a new browser window will appear with all the tabs open. Any changes you make – adding new tabs, moving to a different part of the site, closing a tab altogether – will be saved and reflected to everyone else also using the Workspace.

You do need to be mindful when using Workspaces that everything is shared, so don’t go opening tabs in that window which you don’t want other people to see. Also, when finished, close the whole Workspace window rather than closing each tab, otherwise you’ll remove the tabs for everyone else too. It’s worth having a play to see how useful this might be in sharing stuff between your family or your co-workers.

Alas, like everything else in the split-brain-identity Microsoft has with it’s MSA and Entra IDs, if you choose to invite someone’s Entra/work/school account ID, they must be in the same tenant as you. The UI will let you invite externals but when they click the link to join, they just get an unhelpful error message.

Plus ça change, Microsoft?

81: Mind your Tabs

Posted on June 25, 2025 by ewand

This week we’re talking about Tabs, as in browser tabs, rather than any other kind.

Most people are familiar with the idea of having multiple tabs open in their browser – how many could be a sign of a tidy mind or otherwise (tl;dr – most people have 1-3 windows open with 5-10 tabs in each, so typically anything up to 30 open at once) – and any modern browser has added a load of functionality to make it easier to manage lots of tabs.

Having many open tabs does have an impact on the performance of your computer, as there’s additional stuff for the browser to manage, though Edge has a “Sleeping Tabs” feature (Chrome’s version is “Inactive Tabs”), which puts them into a kind of stasis if not used for a while. Look in the Edge Task Manager if you want to see just how much memory and CPU each tab is taking up…

In principal, there’s no limit on how many tabs you can have other than the resources of the machine itself – some people reportedly have used 1,000 tabs or more, at which point you have to wonder what their mailbox must be like.

One handy tip for Edge and/or Chrome is that you can search open (and recently closed) tabs – press CTRL+SHIFT+A and you can jump to or reopen a tab easily.

Arrangements

One of the simplest and most effective things you can do to deal with many tabs is to display them vertically, especially if you a nice big, wide screen. The vertical tabs pane can be pinned so you can see the page title (and can be resized by dragging the edge right or left), or you can let it collapse back and just see the icons for each site. Hover over any of them and the whole list will reappear.

Enable vertical tabs from the settings or by clicking on the Tab Actions menu on the top left of the Edge window (if you’re in horizontal tab mode). The same menu icon moves down a little, to the very top of the vertical tabs list when that view is enabled.

Surprisingly, Chrome doesn’t offer the ability to arrange tabs vertically without installing 3^rd party addons.

Grouping

It might help to organise your tabs if you put them into groups, that can be quickly expanded and collapsed or moved around; select whichever ones you want by holding the CTRL key down while clicking on them, and then right-click to add them to a new group. Or drag and drop the tabs into an existing group.
A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Edge has a neat “Organis|ze tabs” feature which will suggest how to group open tabs together – it’s accessed from the Tab actions menu.

Run the organise tabs option and it will suggest groupings for you based on the titles of each open tab. Click on the pencil icon to the right of each to change its colour and name, and after applying the grouping you can move things around as you like.

Grouping tabs makes it easier to close them all at once, or to move them between browser windows in one block.

Microsoft has had a few goes at building functionality which lets you persist groups of tabs better, arranged into Collections or Workspaces: that’s fodder for another tip.

#80: What to do about Windows 10

Posted on June 19, 2025 by ewand

As was mentioned in a previous tip – #64: Tick, Tock, Time is up (nearly) for Windows 10 – this October sees Windows 10 take a last gasp as it slips beneath the waves. It hasn’t been getting any enhancements or fixes for a while, except for flaws which compromise its security. After October, it won’t even get any of those.

Well, not entirely. For $30 – for one year and then, who knows – extended support will be available for individuals, or a bit more if you’re a commercial operation, via the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. Enrolment is not yet open but will be sometime before October 14^th.

Microsoft has been signalling for a while now that everyone should move to Windows 11, but due to some somewhat particular (and to some, peculiar) hardware requirements for Win11, there are lots of otherwise perfectly workable Win10 machines which cannot be upgraded. More than half of all PC users will – unless they ditch their old machines and move beforehand – be on the wrong side of the line.

Hardware Upgrade Opportunity

Naturally, PC makers are leaning in on this forcing function; “oh dear, all your old PCs won’t be upgradeable so you’ll need to replace them all”. There are some pretty good reasons why Windows 11 has enforced a specific set of hardware specs, though: almost all to do with security. As threats evolve, modern hardware and operating systems have to develop means to counter them – and in the case of Windows 11, that requires a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 chip to securely store information used to encrypt and protect the machine. Modern CPUs also need to be used, and even if a 7-year old Windows 10 PC might have a fast-enough processor and plenty of memory, it likely won’t have cutting-edge hardware to ensure it can stay secure.

Ever-engaging ex-Microsoft developer Dave Plummer has a good explainer on his Dave’s Garage channel.

Silicon Landfill

Even if you could add a TPM 2.0 module, lots of modern PCs won’t have a processor be on the allow list. One of the earliest flagship devices to fall into this trap is the Microsoft Surface Book, itself only 10 years old in October and although it has TPM 2.0, its CPU processor family is too limited.

The fear is that many users will (be forced to?) carry on running Windows 10 – just as lots still used Windows XP years after it was out of support – or they will grasp the nettle, upgrade to new hardware and then just junk their old machine?

Microsoft, for all its intent to be carbon neutral, is seen by some as an enabler for a likely surge in usable electronics being prematurely scrapped. It’s reckoned 240 million PCs will be ditched, and since the e-waste recycling rate is only around 25%, that’s the equivalent of 180m PCs going into landfill. If they were all laptops stacked on top of one another, it would be more than 10 times the height of the path of the International Space Station.

A computer and a satellite

The flipside is that modern PCs are more energy efficient, they will be more productive (even just because they’re clean and fresh and not full of old stuff). People used to upgrade much more often, so if you only replacing a PC every 7-10 years then it’s better than it was 20 or 30 years ago, where they might only have lasted 4 or 5 years.

Another way

f you have a 10-year old laptop that hasn’t yet devoured its battery or caused incendiary problems, it might still be useful as a second machine or a hand-me-down to other family members.

An original generation Surface Book with a bulging screen caused by a swollen battery (partially visible through the gap).

A Surface Book with bulging battery – from The Microsoft Surface Swollen Battery Problem

One way to keep things running is to check out of the Windows ecosystem altogether.

Since there are over 1 billion users of Windows 10, lots of bad people will be trying to exploit them. Any vulnerability that is discovered in Windows 10 in future could be attacked by nefarious sorts, and since Microsoft won’t be patching it, then you’re at risk of having the crown jewels taken. Even if other operating systems that could run on the same hardware might be intrinsically less secure, they won’t be attacked as much if they are in the minority, so switching to something more obscure could be one form of avoiding attack.

You could wipe Windows and move it to Linux, maybe? Years ago, it might have been the path taken by the less mainstream user, and fans said every year was going to be “the year” of the Linux desktop.

If you’ve a PC – desk or laptop – which is beyond upgrading to Win11 and will be otherwise junked, it might be worth having a play. You could set the machine up to dual-boot between Windows and Linux, and that way could try using Linux and even switch to it as default – leaving Windows there “just in case”, even if it’s not supported and potentially at greater risk from attack.

Chrome Up

A further idea, if you’re sure you don’t need the old machine and are prepared to wipe its Windows clean, is to have a play with Google’s ChromeOS. Designed originally for ChromeBooks – supposedly cheaper laptops that could run more efficiently on lower-spec hardware because they’re not encumbered with all the bloat of Windows – it’s actually possible to run ChromeOS in other places too.

Take a non-supported bit of kit – a first-gen Surface Book, for example – and it’s pretty easy to get the “ChromeOS Flex” variant up and running on it.

· Go to Prepare for installation – ChromeOS Flex Help for instructions. Start by installing the ChromeOS Recovery Utility browser addon on a working PC.

· Take a 16GB USB stick or memory card, and prepare it for ChromeOS by running the Chromebook recovery process, but instead of choosing an existing ChromeBook type, tell it you want to use a device called “Google ChromeOS Flex”.

· Once that’s done, restart your target PC with the bootable USB inserted – hold the SHIFT key while clicking on the Power / Restart option, or look for Advanced Startup options in the settings menu.

· You’ll be able to choose if you want to play with ChromeOS Flex by running it off the USB drive, or whether you’d like to wipe the disk on the PC and install it there instead. Choose.

In a surprisingly short amount of time, you’ll be able to walk through some self-explanatory setup procedures. Now to figure out what to actually do with the thing…

There are some gotchas with ChromeOS Flex – it doesn’t have the Google Play store and Android apps cannot be installed, though there are a variety of non-sanctioned ways to install a generic ChromeOS build (which does have Google Play etc). Good luck.

#79: Do you bother taking notes?

Posted on June 6, 2025 (Updated June 4, 2025) by ewand

When you’re in a meeting or even a phone call, do you write everything down? Whether you listen attentively and then record a summary of events later (mentally or in other form), or you furiously annotate what is happening in real time, it’s a matter of preference which one works.

Some say the act of writing notes help cement things in your memory, like doing revision at school where you’d write a summary of what you were supposed to learn. Or is note taking a mental distraction where you concentrate on the notes more than the nuance of what is happening in the meeting? Or maybe just live in the presence, wing it, and try to remember what occurred later.

Linear people like writing a list of bullets, grabbing key points, comments or decisions as things flow. Other, more visual types might prefer a mind map (or are they just doodling?) The Cornell method prescribes a way of taking notes during the meeting, then revisiting them to take cues and action items, with a summary for later recap. There are many online guides explaining different approaches – in truth, you’ll probably need to try them and see which works best for you.

Whichever one you land on, it’s worth making sure you actually read the notes back – or like some computer programming languages, you’ll end up with write-only notes: they might have made sense at the time, but even their author could look back later and have no idea what they mean.

Perhaps the best way to run a meeting (as well as having an agenda, not making it too long, having everyone stand up to keep them attentive, etc) is to nominate one or two people to take notes and circulate them after the meeting, rather than have everyone taking their own. That deals with the “oh, I’m taking notes on my laptop/phone” excuse too.

Digital Note Takers

If you’re prepared to pay money then there are many options for having an automatic note taker in your meeting; Microsoft pitches both Teams Premium and M365 Copilot as ways of making recordings or transcriptions of Teams meetings, and looking for topics, actions etc.

The idea is that you can go back into a meeting after the event and see a summary of what happened, with the ability to jump back to a specific point in the recording or transcription (so you can check the note-taker got the gist correctly). You’ll get a list of identified actions and who they’re assigned to.

There are pros and cons to Teams’ approach, though – the recording process is non-intrusive and the analytics takes place in the background, and all the data about the meeting is stored in the M365 tenant of the host.

It’s the organiser of the meeting, however, who normally gets to decide if it’s recorded or transcribed, and only (licensed) users within their organisation will get to see the summary. So, if you’re joining a customer meeting which they arranged, you get no auto-notetaking even if you have a Copilot license on your own tenant. If they share the transcript or recording with you, then you could feed it into Copilot (see Kat Beedim from CPS’s excellent process, repurposed in #47: Using Copilot for (consistent) meeting notes) but that won’t have the same fidelity as a full recording.

Un-Fathomable

Another approach besides having Teams or Zoom make the summary, is to use a 3^rd party agent which will do it for you. The market leader is probably Fathom, though there are plenty of other upstart alternatives.

Fathom works by being external to whatever the meeting platform is; you invite Fathom’s “notetaker” to your meeting and it shows up as an additional attendee. This means you may be able to join “your” Fathom to an external Zoom, Teams etc meeting, if the organiser allows attendees to bring additional invitees.

In a similar vein to Teams Premium, it lets you revisit your meeting with audio/video summary linked to extracted notes. You can also share meetings with colleagues who were not present, so they can review actions from events they missed.

One downside to Fathom’s approach is that it needs to be in the meeting to be able to work; that might be obvious, but it lacks the ability to consume a recorded meeting and generate notes after the event. If you forget to invite Fathom or start it recording, tough.

Also, the very appearance of “so-and-so’s Fathom notetaker” in a meeting which you’re organising can be a bit passive/aggressive; normally you’d be expected to ask if anyone minds you recording a meeting, but having someone bring their eavesdropping sidekick in unannounced can be a bit weird.

The media

Reverting to the old-school activity of people sitting in a meeting, listening, contributing and writing their own notes… what’s the best way to do that?

Pad and pen? OneNote on a laptop? ReMarkable tablet? Ah, that is another can of worms to be opened on another occasion.