Hands-On Windows 200 transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands On Windows, we're going to take a look at Microsoft Edge and what's changing in 2026. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands On Windows. I'm Paul Thurrott. And this week we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics, not really, but Microsoft Edge, Microsoft's semi-beliegered browser. This is the replacement for Internet Explorer.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:33]:
Yeah, you may recall that it was originally kind of marketed as Google Chrome, but without the Google, which honestly sounds like kind of a neat idea to me, but they have really ensured— ensured this thing and used it as a vector for that in Windows 11, right? Where they force you to use Microsoft Edge even if you don't want to, even if you've configured a different browser in certain circumstances. So we've talked about that before. We've talked about the different ways you can kind of work around or even fix that, but Um, it is interesting to me that in a year where Microsoft is fixing Windows 11, or is in their words, addressing the pain points that customers have, they've been kind of quiet about Microsoft Edge. But as it turns out, they're actually doing some similar things there. They're still adding some new features, of course, but they're starting to kind of chip away at the bloat, right? Because that's what's— that's, that's the primary problem with, uh, Microsoft Edge. So this is Edge. This is kind of a default, uh, honestly fairly minimalist install of this thing. Normally there's a lot of garbage on the screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:35]:
I get rid of that immediately. I can't stand it, all that newsfeed stuff. But, um, you know, Edge is unique in Windows, just like any browser is unique in any operating system, because it's the most powerful app that we use, the app that we use the most. There's a lot of deep system integration, of course. This thing updates itself. You can't update this through Windows Update or through the Microsoft Store. You can update it through Winget sometimes, interestingly, but it has its own updating mechanism. They are moving to a new updating schedule.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:09]:
As I record this, I believe I'm on Edge 150. It's probably the same. Yeah, this is up to date. But as I record this, they are releasing new versions of Edge every, I believe it's 4 weeks, but in August or sometime later this year, they're going to switch to every 2 weeks matching the Edge schedule, which, you know, makes sense. It's based on Chromium, et cetera. But in a support document for the release of version 150 of the browser, Microsoft just casually threw out this line that they're simplifying Edge, right? Which it needs. You know, you can see on this, this is not a particularly high-resolution screen. The scaling's a little high, but You know, this gigantic menu, you know, jumps off the bottom of the screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:50]:
You have to scroll through it. If you find some of these submenus are the same thing, it's just, you know, it's just a very cluttered user interface. So they've already made a couple of changes. Before I recorded this, there was a feature called Collections, which dates back to Windows 10, some— sometimes, you know, maybe not 10 years ago, but certainly 7, 8 years ago. That's already gone. Collections was sort of redundant, you know, between all the different ways we have to save information. through a browser. But anyway, I know some people like that, but it's gone.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:19]:
And then the sidebar apps are gone. I can't show it to you because they're gone. There are still sidebar experiences in here, which are really hard to find if you're actually looking for them. But if you go through here, for example, like Secure Network Performance, there's a shopping experience. I'll just throw this one. And so you get the idea of a sidebar, right? So it's this thing that pops over on the side. But before we started doing Copilot here in Microsoft Edge, there was a lot of work on these sidebar experiences, one of which was this series of small apps that some of which were built in so you could just add your own, et cetera. And that's gone.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:53]:
Alrighty. So the first new feature I can't show you, unfortunately, I don't have it in this version, but it was just released, is the ability to sign in to Edge using a Google account like you would in Google Chrome. Right now, this thing supports only Microsoft accounts, or if you're part of a managed organization, Microsoft work and school accounts. Um, you might know that inside of Edge you can set up multiple profiles. It could be any combination of, uh, home, like work and personal profiles. And right now this is not working. Um, it just goes right to the sign-in screen, which is how you sign in with Microsoft. So it's not there.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:31]:
And if I'm not mistaken, this thing probably— yep, added, added a profile I did not want, but that's fine. Soon we're going to be able to add like Gmail profiles, essentially Google account profiles. That's interesting. Okay. This one is really cool. It's, it's, it's a simplification and sort of extension of an existing feature. But if I just find an article on my website, like this one from earlier today, you might know that Microsoft or Microsoft Edge has had something called Immersive Reader, which is now called Reading Mode. So, duh, you know, that makes sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:05]:
You access it the same way as you did before through this, through an icon. The icon looks a little different, but also through F9. You can choose different themes and, you know, colors and column widths and all kinds of other things. It's, it's actually really nice. And the point of this is fairly obvious. It's to show you the article you're reading, but without any of the distractions, you know, ads and whatever else is going on in the the browser window. It's nice. It still doesn't support a way to automatically open articles this way.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:36]:
Some browsers do have that kind of thing. Um, read aloud is— OpenAI announces ChatGPT work in GPT-5.6. It's a big day for OpenAI with the release of ChatGPT. I'll just let that go now, sorry. Um, but you get the idea of that. So that works as it did before, if you've used that before, but it has really good voices. There's an incredible selection of very natural sounding voices you can you know, choose the one that you like, et cetera. So that's kind of nice.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:00]:
And it has these Copilot features. So, and actually I should add this one to the Copilot feature. So it does different language translations, which this is awesome. So I can scroll down to say Spanish if I can find it. And pretty quick, right? It goes right into Spanish. Nice. Put that back. And then it has summarize, explain, and then just chat with Copilot.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:19]:
And each of these things is going to bring up the The Copilot sidebar. Or no, that's not true. I'm sorry. Chat with Copilot will do that. So this is the standard, you know, we've had this for a couple of years now. Whoops. Get rid of you. But the other 2 are a little more, well, that is, I'm sorry.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:38]:
They are in fact sidebar experiences. Okay. Never mind. I thought they might be popups, but you get the idea. You can summarize, learn more, and then just kind of interact. And when you do the Chat with Copilot one, It kind of has it listed down here. So it's, it's sort of grounding the conversation you're about to have with Copilot with that article. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:00]:
All right. So since we've talked about Copilot, we should mention Copilot again, because obviously there's a lot of Copilot stuff happening in Windows. So I'm going to start with this here. So like I said, this is the basic normal new tab screen that Edge provides. You can customize this in a couple of ways. This is how you customize this page. I'm not going to do that. I've already made it, you know, pretty minimalist.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:22]:
If you've ever used Google Chrome, you've probably seen this thing before. So basic, you know, background image, theme colors, you know, all that stuff, right? So, and also toolbar icons, which is pretty useful, kind of like a mini, mini customized interface. But now you can switch to this new look and optionally you can switch to a Copilot new tab page, which I'll do in one moment. So this is actually simpler. I'm fascinated that it did not throw the feed on. It usually does do that. Um, it, this is almost like an attempt to, um, like bypass your customizations, but, um, that's not happening here. Thank God.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:59]:
But that's fine. Um, if you want to go full-blown Copilot and who doesn't, um, you could go into settings and go to the Copilot settings page. And this is enabled by default, of course. That's why that's there. We can enable the new tab page. And I guess that's about it for this. So now when I go to new tab, you get this— oops, I just closed the window. You get this new look page.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:25]:
Now, this is kind of interesting. It pulled in the, you know, these quick links here. You can customize it like the previous pages. It's got the kind of Copilot look and feel. The fonts and everything are different and nice. You can Change how many lines are out of those things. It has these kind of recommendations down here, et cetera. Sometimes these are based on what you've chatted with, but this is more of a full Copilot experience.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:49]:
You can do this from sidebar too, in many ways, but you get, you know, access to Tasks, Health, which is brand new, Shopping. The Shopping experience is kind of transitioning over to Copilot. Imagine is a way to create images, right? So all that kind of stuff. I don't want to spend too much time on Copilot. We'll probably be talking more about Copilot soon. You know, it's kind of unavoidable, but, uh, this is, this is kind of interesting. So, um, these are your options now with that kind of thing. I will, I will give them credit for this, by the way.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:24]:
Um, a lot of these chatbot things have an interface for choosing models and things, which doesn't make any sense. Microsoft is making this a little more plain English, but they're also leaving it as on. This default smart option, and that will choose the right model on the backend depending on what you're doing. So you can use a faster, less expensive model if you're doing something, you know, silly or just need a quick answer. If you need some kind of deep research thing, it will switch over to that, et cetera. And that all depends on whether you have a Microsoft 365 account and credits to use, you know, Copilot beyond the free stuff. But again, I don't want to spend too much time on that. I'm going to close.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:01]:
Edge, and then I'm going to pray a little bit because these things have a way of not working. But, uh, yeah, there we go. Perfect. So there is a— let me see, let me— oh, maybe I did it wrong. Hold on. It's Windows+Shift+F. There we go. Uh, brings up something called the Edge search bar.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:18]:
So we're starting to see other companies do this too. Google has something like this. This is a way to search from anywhere in Windows, not just in the browser, and it will go to the browser at some point. Also to do visual search with Bing. So you could search for things that are on the screen, right? So let's see if I can try this, like Hands-On Windows Podcast, and then you search. And it would just, in my case, because I've actually customized it to use Google as the search engine, it actually used Google to search for that. So that's actually pretty useful. If I close this thing again, you can see it's there.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:53]:
I can do the keyboard shortcut again. No, I can't. I was going to say, I thought I might close it, but you can just close it that way. But if you do the keyboard shortcut again, just keeps coming back. So you can leave it on screen or not. Um, it will go under Windows. At least it's not like always on top by default, but you know, if that's something that you want to use, it's interesting to me, by the way, that you can go to Google from there. So that's pretty cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:14]:
Um, and then this, this one is, this is not an uncommon feature, but I just noticed this kind of recently. I, I wasn't aware that, um, You could do this with multiple tabs, but if I go to— I'm just going to use YouTube because it's easy, but go to YouTube in multiple tabs and you can see all my ridiculous horror movie and technology things that I watch. I'll just start up some video. I'll mute it and you get this little media control, right? And this is a way to control that tab and whatever's playing, even if you're in other tabs, right? So you've seen this before. Interestingly though, I can just go in here, I guess. There is a chance. Mute that. And now, and I'll just open another tab, just make it less noisy here, less busy.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:02]:
You can see there's actually both of those things are there, right? So you could sort of arbitrarily pause or, you know, skip through. You can put one of them in a picture-in-picture mode, right? So that it's over the other thing. So it's still playing even though we're on this different tab, or you can even be outside the browser, of course. But I like this little— maybe it was always like this and I just noticed it, but this Media Control Center interface is actually very cool because it supports multiple tabs. So maybe you have audio going somewhere, you know, whatever it might be. You might have different sources of media or whatever playing, so you can actually kind of control it all from one place. It's nice. And the other one, and this is also not necessarily new, but it's just, it is semi-unique to Edge, and I do think I think it's kind of cool, is an ability to use AI to create a theme for the browser.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:51]:
So if you go into Appearance and, yeah, they have these different themes. So the default theme looks like this. I'm in dark mode, so it's kind of hard to say. This is the default theme for like the Copilot mode of the thing. It's just slightly different. But you can see down here, obviously you can install themes from the store. That works fine. It's good stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:11]:
But you also can use this AI theme generator, which I actually kind of like. So you can type in a prompt. I'm not going to do that right now, but I'll just, I'll borrow a prompt. So the dinosaur planet, create the theme. It's going to take several seconds, I guess. But once this is done, you'll, it will change, you know, what the browser looks like, obviously based on the prompt that you provided. And then it will let you edit it. But let me step it back.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:43]:
Um, okay. It looks like I confused Copilot. Wow. I've never seen a progress bar go backwards anyway. So you get, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but, um, you get the idea. So while this is doing its thing, I'll just, I'll kind of wrap this up. So I will say, um, pain points. I'm not sure I can claim that that's what they're doing.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:04]:
You know, Edge still opens. When you, you know, click on a story in widgets or click on a search result from Windows Search, even if you have a different browser specified as your default, right? This is the, the, this is the big insertification problem, I think. That said, I, there are places where you click on something in Windows in the Settings app and elsewhere where it's going to open a web link and it actually does open your default browser. I mean, that's what we always want. There's all the tracking stuff. That's why you need the right extension. Strongly recommend Privacy Badger, you block Origin. I know it's been defanged a bit, but still very good.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:38]:
Ghostery, Adblock Plus, et cetera. I'm just kind of cut down on the junk. You should do that in any browser. It's super important in Microsoft Edge. You know, it's— I, this one, I don't think— yeah. So I don't have this one. It actually is the default. If it wasn't, there would actually be a change to default web browser link here, which is just, you know, annoying.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:59]:
All the standard coercions, et cetera, still exist, but I, you know, I've always liked the idea of Microsoft Edge. It's just that they kind of went off the deep end with all of the junk they added to it. You know, it's very busy. So maybe we will get some actual relief sometime this year. It looks like it's not going to happen for this theme generator I wanted to show you, but you get the idea. Anyway, thank you for watching. Um, thank you so much, uh, to everyone, but especially to our club Club, Twit members, we love you. We love you.