Transcript
Paul Thurrott (0:00)
Coming up next on Hands on Windows is a show I never thought I would record. I'm going to try to convince you to use Microsoft Edge. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
Will (0:12)
Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.
Paul Thurrott (0:20)
That's not the itinerary we're following.
Will (0:23)
Well, I'm departing from ATT and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.
Paul Thurrott (0:36)
Bon voyage.
T-Mobile Representative (0:38)
Introducing Family Freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com FamilyFreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte $829.99 Eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off earlier, cancel contact T mo Ever notice.
Amazon Music Representative (1:05)
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Red Canary Representative (1:37)
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Paul Thurrott (2:14)
This is twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurt and this week is an unusual topic for me. We've talked about Microsoft Edge a lot over the years. We've talked about how it's a problem. We've talked about how you should configure it correctly whether you use it or not. I've been kind of down on edge for years, really, and the reason is because of all that insertification stuff that's going on in Windows 11 and Edge in particular is kind of a vector for the bad behavior that we see in Windows 11. But beside that, there's something interesting happening with Edge that's been going on now for about a year, maybe a year and a half, where Microsoft has been also, you know, doing the terrible stuff, but also doing these things with Edge that are actually very interesting and make the browser more interesting to me as a user. The biggest one is they are rewriting all of the user interface components using a new technology called Web UI 2.0 instead of using the old kind of REACT based user interface. And they have seen dramatic performance improvements as a result. So if you bring up Edge and you click on something like this extensions button, I'll bring up what else would be a good example of this. Maybe just history or whatever. These are the types of interfaces that would come up really slowly in the. In the past. And over time they have been slowly rewriting different parts of this. And now on average, across three 13 browser features that they have converted, this thing is actually 40% faster, which is enormous. That's incredible to me. The other thing they've been doing, which is kind of contrary to the whole point of Edge in some ways is getting rid of features that few people use. So they're actually debloating it a little bit. You know, Edge is really feature rich and that's interesting to me. So for that reason, those reasons, and because I have to work on the book and do the things I do for the site and for the podcast here, I've been using Edge more lately and I've actually found that I like it. It's kind of a weird thing to say. And look, the basics are all the same. It's based on Chromium, so it works like the browser that everyone uses. It works with all the same extensions, etc. It does everything that browsers do. But in addition to those performance benefits, which is really kind of a responsiveness improvement or whatever, I just wanted to highlight a few of the features that I think are not necessarily unique in the sense that some other browsers do have these features, obviously, but are kind of marquee Edge features that you may find of interest. Okay, so the first and most obvious. Let me go to a web article. I'll go to something that I wrote. So Microsoft is integrating AI into its browser, which all the browser makers are doing to some degree, some radically and some a little more conservatively. Microsoft's approach is pretty conservative, but they do it through this Edge sidebar, which by default is this copilot view Copilot of course being the name of Microsoft's AI. And this is literally the copilot experience as Microsoft described it before we even had it, meaning it sits side by side with the thing that you're doing. And that's why having an AI of any kind in a browser actually makes at least some sense, because you can have it interact with the page you're looking at. So for the most obvious, I'm sure we've done this over the past few months, but it can take the context of the thing you're looking at and then provide a summary. You don't have to paste in a URL or do anything strange, it will just do that thing. And so this is just providing an AI based summary of this article which isn't particularly long, but that's fine. And it just, it's just there in the browser. It's not another window. It's not something you have to switch context. It's just kind of there, which I think is really cool. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.