Monday, August 10, 2015

The Microsoft Edge - A browser for the devotee



The Win10 Experience - Microsoft Edge

Win10 replaces Internet Explorer (IE) with the Microsoft Edge, but you wouldn’t notice it at first. The Edge icon is a slightly stylized version of a lower case “e” – looks a lot like the old IE icon, with a more hip (or maybe LESS hip) haircut.

Two things strike you at first blush of Edge: First, the menu bar you are accustomed to across the top of Internet Explorer is … different.  It has tabs, like before, but there is leftmost “Start” command, Next,, the entry screen is tiled (like a tablet screen) with  LOT of entries form the Net.  On my 17” laptop, at the default 100% size, there are about 80 screens of web links across 11 topics plus “My Topics.” A small text note informs me this “My News Feed – powered by MSN.

Among the tools on the top bar is the “pencil in a square” indicating you can make Web Notes – write on the page, add a text box, highlight with a pen tool, and save/send the page, plus a direct clipping tool.  However, this does not apply to the Edge home screen, which is customizable but not fully accessible to the user – no Web Note capability there. There is, through that Home button, the ability to navigate right back to your first tab, the "My News Feed.” This is important if you have not set the browser to open all new screens in a new tab, and want to go back without scrolling through all those interesting pages you browsed, and you never thought to activate the Setting to show a HOME button.
If you miss the sarcasm there, it’s that Microsoft has given you a new way to do something there were already three or four ways to do, while keeping all of the old ways, backward compatibility for the Browser Idiot.

The Web Notes capability looks pretty interesting, but I’ll have to investigate before I proclaim it a windfall of Win10.

Tomorrow, I will take a stroll with Cortana, or WinSiri.

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