Transcript
Paul Thurrott (0:00)
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at Copilot mode in Microsoft Edge and whether it competes in any way with some of the new AI browsers that we're seeing.
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Paul Thurrott (1:40)
Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurant and this week we're going to take a look at a new feature in Microsoft Edge called Copilot Mode. Now, we just did, I think, three episodes about Microsoft Edge fairly recently, pros, cons, different ways to configure it, and so forth. But now we've got this new thing coming. So this is Microsoft's early response to some of the first AI powered web browsers that we're seeing out in the world. Things like Neo and Neon actually, and Dia and Comet from Perplexity, et cetera, because it's from Microsoft. It's a slightly more conservative approach to AI in the browser, but I guess that's to be expected. So basically this new feature impacts two things. One is this new tab page that we're looking at here, which is the standard new tab page that I've kind of cut down some of the junk on. And then the other is the Copilot button up here and how that works, right? And so if you think about Microsoft Edge today and you want to use Copilot for some reason, this opens up into a sidebar, right, as you see here. So you will be offered Copilot Mode, the First time you upgrade Edge to a version that supports it, I've disabled it. So you can kind of see what that looks like. But the way to turn it on is just to go into settings, AI innovations, and then just turn it on. And when you do that, the new tab page changes. So this is the dark mode version of it. In light mode it's more of that kind of light tan copiloty kind of look and feel, but there you go. So this in its own way is actually already an improvement, right? Because the default new tab page in Microsoft Edge is pretty busy. I toned it down like I said. But I also typically use a third party extension as a new tab experience and when you enable this mode, it actually overwrites that. So it disabled that extension in my case and it will for you, whatever one you happen to be using. So there's this, and this is what it looks like. You know, you've got this kind of Copilot chat experience. It has a few suggestions here and then it has these quick links to sites that have used a lot. This is not particularly configurable. If you go up into settings here, you can turn it on and off. So either want that on or you want it off. There's no way to go into an individual one and say, well, I don't want this, or add a new one. You know, maybe that's something that changes over time. I think it's fair to say this is going to get a little more full featured and convoluted as we go, but this is what we've got right now. The other big change is the copilot button moved. So I know that doesn't sound like a huge change, but the overall experience is also different. So in addition to not being over here in the corner when you click it by default, actually we'll get this thing which is a kind of a quick action view or a quick link view. And it's not movable, you know, you can't drag it around, you can't resize it, you really can't do anything with it. And I kind of prefer the old side pane approach frankly, because it sits side by side with the page you're viewing. So if I were to go to my site, for example, and load an article because I might want to interact with it for whatever reason. Let me find one that's reasonable in length and let's see, maybe this one because it's an AI browser story. So when you bring up Copilot here, you know, one of the things you might want to do with this is, you know, create a summary of this page like we have here, which is fine. It works well enough. It's. It's okay. But it is also over the article itself. So if you prefer that old style, you can pin it. And that's what I had done before, actually. So if you like to have this side by side, and I do actually kind of prefer this, you can get that experience back. So that's good. I'm going to put it back the way it was, just to give you the default experience. But okay, so that's kind of interesting. Also some keyboard shortcuts involved here. So let's see if I can remember this correctly. In previous to copilot mode, it was control shift comma but now there's a new, simpler keyboard shortcut that will be easy to remember, which is just alt C. So it does the same thing. You don't see me typing the keyboard. Keyboard shortcut, but all plus C copilot. Right. That's kind of a simple one. And that brings that thing up in a simpler way. So as far as the UI change, whatever, it's still the same copilot experience. It's just in a different place, slightly different ui, et cetera, et cetera. It's fine. There's just a few other changes that are interesting and then there's some new functionality. And I think this is the area where it's really going to expand a lot. I don't want to suggest that this is innovative, but in the past when you did new tab in Edge, so Control T, if you started typing, you would be typing in the address bar. And by default now when you do new tab to this experience, you can see I'm typing in the chat box, right? And at first this was a little alarming to me, but actually you can just type Control L or probably Alt D to get back to it, right? Which is. Are the standard shortcuts for accessing that thing, you know, the address bar. So if you intend to use the address bar normally, like I might and just type, you know, website address like I just did, that still works, but you can also just do it from the chat box. So it's. It's a little smart in the sense that if I just type something like throt.com there it will go to the website, but if I type something that's clearly a query when you know this will already have happened by the time you see this video. But when will Apple announce new iPhones? This will actually launch a chat session. Right. And in this case they're summarizing information that comes from the web, et cetera, as they would a lot of Bing stuff in here. But you know, this works like, you know, like Copilot always has. So that's, that's fine.