Making Use of Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge has replaced the old Internet Explorer, holding a great promise for those that are looking to migrate from other browsers - it is fully customizable, fast, and reliable.
Here are some ways on how you can bend Edge to your liking:
Setup Your Start Page
In order to change what you would first see when you pull up Edge and start browsing, navigate to Settings → Open with. In this section, you may choose New Tab page, Previous pages, Start page, or A specific page or pages.
Should you choose to open Edge with a specific page or pages, you would get an option of starting Edge with either Bing, MSN, or any page that you have in mind. If you want a custom page to load every time you start up Edge, choose Custom, and then type the URL of your choice on the textbox. Should you want to add more pages to start automatically, click on the + symbol.
If you want to remove a page, click on the X symbol that appears next to the URL of the page you want to remove. You can also rearrange the pages according to the order that you want them to appear by dragging them around.
Setting Up New Tabs
After deciding how your start up page should be setup, you can also customize what you would be seeing when you pull up a fresh tab in Edge. You can allow Edge to show you suggested content according to your web browsing preferences, top sites, or a blank new page. Keep in mind that compared to Internet Explorer, you would no longer have the option to choose a custom URL for your new tab to automatically load.
To select what will load when you click on New tab, navigate to Settings → Open new tabs with, and then choose from the drop-down menu that appears. If you select your new tab to open with Top sites and suggested content, you can customize suggestions based on content, your choice of topics, or language.
Change Edge's Theme
Edge does not have support for any third-party themes, just like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, although reports say that they would have this support option in the future. Right now, you can change how Edge looks like by selecting from the built-in themes that Microsoft has provided for this browser. Currently, you only have two selections to choose from, which are Light (the default Edge look), or Dark.
If you want to change the theme of your browser, click on the ellipses (...) button that you would find on the upper right corner. Afterwards, select Settings and click on Choose a theme. From the dropdown menu, select Light if you want to maintain the light gray look of Edge. If you want your toolbars and menus to appear black with a white font, then choose Dark.
Making Use of Caret Browsing
If you are using your tablet or your touchpad, you may have experienced wanting to copy and paste a particular text to your browser to perform a search, but you simply are missing out some letters because your cursor does not accurately grab the lines that you want to copy. Now, Microsoft has created a support for those who are having a hard time copying and pasting text from webpages. This support, which exists on browsers like Firefox and Chrome is called caret browsing.
Caret browsing is a browser feature that allows you to navigate the webpages that you visit using your keyboard. In essence, it allows you to scroll through any web page similar to the way that you navigate Microsoft Word with a text cursor, even though you are scrolling through web lines that you cannot edit.
To turn this feature on, simply hit on the F7 key on your keyboard while you are in the current tab where you want to copy a specific text. A window will appear, asking you if you want to use caret browsing for that specific page. Click on Yes to turn it on. If you want to toggle caret browsing off, hit on F7 key again.
Should you want to always enable caret browsing for all pages, click on the ellipses (...) button, and then click on Settings. Navigate to Advanced Settings and then select View Advanced Settings. In here, turn on the toggle menu for the Always use caret browsing. Restart Edge to reflect the changes that you have made.
Once you have turned the caret browsing on for all pages, clicking anywhere on the page would give you a blinking text cursor. Should you click on the part of the page that does not have any text to highlight, the cursor would automatically appear on the closest text that you can select. When you are ready to highlight a text for copying, hold down the Shift key, and then use your arrow keys to select the portion of the text that you want to copy.
Importing Bookmarks from Other Browsers
If you want to turn Edge into your primary browser, one of the things that you need to do is to import your bookmarks from other browsers that you may have previously installed. Luckily, this task is remarkably easy to do in Edge, especially if you have these bookmarks saved already.
If you have another browser installed in your PC, you can directly migrate these bookmarks into Edge by doing the following:
- Load Edge, and then click on the ellipses (...) button. Click on Settings.
- Select Import favorites from another browser.
- Choose the browser where you want to import your bookmarks from.
If you are planning to import bookmarks out of an HTML file, then you would need to migrate them first to another browser, such as Firefox and Chrome. Right now, Edge does not offer support to HTML browser migration.
Tweaking Security Features in Edge
If you have been using Google Chrome in the past, you would realize that Edge pretty much behaves the same way but in a more minimal manner. That means to say that it does not allow any add-ons yet, and it has removed many of the IE legacy technologies in order to make browsing more secure.
Here are the most important privacy and security settings in Edge that you need to familiarize yourself with:
- InPrivate:
InPrivate is similar to Incognito mode in Chrome - it does not allow you to store cookies, temporary files, or save anything to your browser's history if you have it on. If you want to pull up an InPrivate window, click on the ellipses (...) button, and then select New InPrivate Window. Alternately, you can use the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + P. - Other Advanced Settings:
Here are other security settings that you can toggle on and off by navigating to the Advanced Settings menu, and then going to View Advanced Settings.- pop-up blocking - blocks any pop-ups that automatically launch through some triggers in a page that you are viewing, like ads or redirects. You can also set exceptions on some pop-ups that you may want to view.
- SmartScreen - performs a reputation check on any website that you visit to protect you from phishing attacks.
- Do Not Track - prevents cookies coming from another source from being saved in your PC.
- Store or delete passwords and other auto-fill forms.
- Download history.
- Cookies - you can choose if you want Edge to block cookies coming from third-party sites, block all cookies, or allow all cookies.
Clearing History
If you want to clear Edge's history, all you need to do is to head over to Settings, and then select Choose what to clear under the Clear browsing data. Here, you can choose to clear your browsing data manually, delete saved website data and cookies, cached files and data, and record of your downloads, auto-fill forms, media licenses, passwords, location permits you have previously issues, and pop-up exceptions. Click all that you want to delete and then hit clear.
