Paul Thurrott – a well known Microsoft commentator who’s branched out in recent years to cover lots of other tech too but is basically still a Microsoftie at heart, has published lots and lots of advice on www.Thurrott.com… If you haven’t tried the new Edge out yet, then give it a whirl – it’s not finished and it’s not perfect, but so far it feels fast and it’s (mostly) compatible… These are the Features Microsoft Turned Off or Replaced in Chromium-Based Edge – lots of Google services built into Chrome have been switched off. Or replaced by Microsoft services doing much the same thing, only more trustworthily and less advertisingy… Living on the (New) Edge: Getting Started Living on the (New) Edge: What Syncs, What Doesn’t – though see we’ve already announced plans to update Android version of Edge to sync back with the new desktop Edge. Living on the (New) Edge: Extensions – since there are some popular classic Edge extensions that aren’t yet showing up in the new Edge extension lists, you too can put Chrome ones in there. Like OneNote Web Clipper. Living on the (New) Edge: Favorites – familiar if you already use Chrome Living on the (New) Edge: On Startup and New Tab – one of the nicest features… you get the beautiful Bing image with your most-used tiles, and all the clickbait-infested Microsoft News content is a scroll away. Living on the
And there are many more… but we’ll finish up with:
Everyone Needs the New Microsoft Edge (Premium)
Thurrot has a premium subscription service to get certain content, though you can read a couple of articles for free. In this one, he summarises why he thinks the new Edge will be good for all –
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Tag: Chromium
Tip o’ the Week 475 – Chrome-plating to the Edge
After early builds were leaked, the Edge team has been working to release the preview in daily (“Canary”) builds, or weekly (“Developer”) versions. They can be side-loaded alongside both the regular Edge browser and Chrome, so giving it a try is a fairly low risk activity, and in unscientific comparison tests it appears to be as fast or slightly faster than both Chrome and the other Edge. Check out more info on the Edge Dev blog, and get the latest build from the Edge Insider site. The Chromium-based Edge (already being referred to as “Edgium” by some) will support addins built for Chrome, though for now, just a subset are available from the Microsoft Store, and many more will follow and it is possible to add others.
Other oddities include shortcut keys – in old Edge, CTRL+SHIFT+P will launch an InPrivate window (useful for logging into Azure portal or Office365 admin page using different creds … what else?) but in both Chrome and the Edge Dev build, that launches the print dialog, and Incognito/InPrivate is CTRL+SHIFT+N. |
Tip o’ the Week 470 – Chrome Activities on Time
In short, the browser application will be rewired to use the open-source Chromium rendering engine, meaning that Edge will be every bit as compatible as Chrome is in displaying web pages and apps. It doesn’t mean that Edge will look and feel the same as Chrome, though – if the latter is a skin on the Chromium engine that provides a load of additional functionality, so Edge will be a different skin but will look and act much the same as it does today. For now, at least, there are a lot of Chrome users on Windows 10 and various teams at Microsoft have gone to some lengths to build Chrome extensions to support other services or software, maybe in the same way they work on Edge or even beyond. See here for a list of Chrome extensions published by Microsoft.
It’s a fantastic way of searching not just browser history, but other activities – like Office docs or many Windows apps.
So, if you’re currently using Chrome under sufferance but would like to keep most of your browsing in Edge, having browsed in Chrome and gone back to the Timeline, it will give you the option of using your default – Edge – or using the other one, er, Edge… |