Loading summary

Transcript10 lines

[00:01]
Starbucks Frappuccino Advertiser
Morning decisions. How about a creamy mocha Frappuccino drink? Or sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe? Or white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Still waiting in line again, that's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with stamps.com over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with stamps.com join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Now print postage for certified mail, registered mail and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office for a limited time. Go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.
[00:45]
Paul Thurrott
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 Perrott and this week we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics. Not really, but Microsoft Edge, Microsoft's semi belly grid browser. This is the replacement for Internet Explorer. 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 insertified 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 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 Microsoft Edge. So this is Edge, this is kind of a default, honestly, fairly minimalist install of this thing. Normally there's a lot of garbage on the screen. I get rid of that immediately. I can't stand it, all that newsfeed stuff. But 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 Wingate Winget sometimes, interestingly, but. But it's. It has its own updating mechanism. They are moving to a new updating schedule. 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 four weeks, but in August or sometime later this year, they're going to switch to every two weeks, matching the Edge schedule, which, you know, makes sense. It's based on chromium, etc. But in a support document for the Release of version 150, the browser Microsoft just casually throw 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 is a little high, but, you know, this gigantic menu, you know, jumps off the bottom of the screen. You have to scroll through it if you find some of these sub menus 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 seven, eight 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. 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. So you get the idea of a sidebar, right. So it's this thing that pops over in 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, etc. And that's gone. But it's not just about getting rid of things. Microsoft is also adding new features to Edge and some of them are pretty interesting. So we'll take A look at those right after the break.
[04:51]
Accenture/Spotify Advertiser
This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more@accenture.com Spotify get business done with
[05:21]
American Express Advertiser
the new American Express Graphite Business Cash unlimited card with unlimited 2% cash back on all eligible purchases. Unlimited 5% cash back on flights and prepaid hotels booked through American Express. Travel online and a flexible spending capacity that can grow with your business. You'll have the confidence to keep building. Apply today and earn a welcome offer of $1,500 cash back after you spend $50,000 in qualifying purchases on your new card within the first six months of card membership terms. Apply. Learn more at GO MX Graphite Alrighty.
[05:51]
Paul Thurrott
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. You might know that inside of Edge you can set up multiple profiles. It could be any combination of like work and personal profiles. And right now this is not working. It just goes right to the sign in screen, which is how you sign in with Microsoft. So it's not there. And if I'm not mistaken, this thing probably. Yep, added, added a profile I did not want. But that's fin. 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, you know, that makes sense. 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, 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. It's nice. It still doesn't support a way to automatically open articles this way. Some browsers do have that kind of thing read aloud.
[07:36]
Accenture/Spotify Advertiser
OpenAI announces ChatGPT work in GPT 5.6 It's a big day for OpenAI with the release of Chat GPT.
[07:43]
Paul Thurrott
I'll just let that go now, sir. But you get the idea there. 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, etc. So that's kind of nice. 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, Goes right into Spanish. Nice. Put that back. And then it has summarize, explain, and then just chat with Copilot 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 years now. Whoops. Really? You. But the other two are a little more. Well, that is. I'm sorry, they are in fact cyber experiences. Okay, never mind. I thought they might be pop ups, but you get the idea. You can summarize, learn more, and then just kind of interact. And when you do the chat with co opilot1, 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. 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 ways. This is how you customize this page. I'm not going to do that. I've already made it, you know, pretty minimalist. 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 tap 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. This is almost like an attempt to like bypass your customizations. But that's not happening here, thank God. But that's fine if you want to go full blown Copilot. And who doesn't? 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. 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 cool pilot 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, etc. Sometimes these are based on what you've chatted with, but this is more of a full Copilot experience. You can do this from sidebar to. To many, 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 as 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 this is kind of interesting. So these are your options now with that kind of thing. I will, I will give them credit for this. By the way, a lot of these chatbot things have a 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 back end 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, etc. 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 Edge and then I'm going to pray a little bit because these things have a way of not working. But yeah, there we go. Perfect. So there is a. Maybe I did it wrong. Hold on. It's Windows Shift plus F. There we go. Brings up something called the Edge search bar. 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 can 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 a 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. 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, it just keeps coming back. So you can leave it on screen or not. 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. And then this, this one is. This is not an uncommon feature, but I just noticed this kind of recently. I wasn't aware that 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 on 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 for. Interestingly though, I can just go in here. I guess there is a mute that. And now and I'll just open another tab. Just make it less noisy here, less busy. 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 there 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 it's kind of cool. Cool is an ability to use AI to create a theme for the browser. 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. The default theme for like the co pilot 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. 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 borrow a prompt. So the dinosaur planet create the theme. It's going to take several seconds I guess, but once this is done, 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 and get back. Okay. It looks like I confused copilot.
[15:46]
Accenture/Spotify Advertiser
Wow.
[15:47]
Paul Thurrott
I've never seen a progress bar go backwards anyway, so I don't want to spend too much time on this. But you get the idea. So while this is doing its thing, I'll kind of wrap this up. So I will say pain points. I'm not sure I can claim that that's what they're doing. 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 you block Origin. I know it's been defanged a bit, but still very good. Ghost3ad block plus, etc. 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. All the standard coercions, etc. 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. Thank you so much to everyone, but especially to our Club Twit members. We love you. If you are not a member, you can learn more about that program at TWIT tv. Club Twit. We have a new episode of this podcast every Thursday. You can find out more about that at TWIT tv. How thank you. I'll see you next week. If you like what you heard and
[17:44]
American Express Advertiser
you want more of this week's top stories in tech, well, subscribe to Tech News Weekly. Every Thursday I talk with the journalists making and breaking the tech news.

Summary5 min read

Hands-On Windows 200: Edge's 2026 Overhaul

Host: Paul Thurrott
Date: July 30, 2026

Episode Overview

In this special milestone episode, Paul Thurrott takes a deep dive into Microsoft Edge's substantial 2026 overhaul. He explores how Edge is both cutting back on unnecessary bloat and introducing intriguing new features—with a particular focus on Copilot integration, UI simplification, and user control improvements. Paul shares honest, irreverent commentary on long-standing Edge pain points, gives live walkthroughs of the latest updates, and highlights what still needs to change for Microsoft to regain browser fans’ trust.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The State of Microsoft Edge in 2026

Bloat and Simplification:
Paul describes Edge as "Microsoft's semi belly grid browser" and bemoans its history of creeping bloat and user-unfriendly defaults.

"Normally there's a lot of garbage on the screen. I get rid of that immediately. I can't stand it, all that newsfeed stuff." (Paul, 01:45)
Update Cadence Changes:
Microsoft is transitioning Edge’s update schedule from every four weeks to every two, aligning with Chromium’s pace.

"They're going to switch to every two weeks...in August or sometime later this year, matching the Edge schedule." (Paul, 02:55)
Removing Redundancies:
Legacy features like "Collections" and sidebar mini-apps are being cut (“Collection was sort of redundant...between all the different ways we have to save information”). Some sidebar experiences remain, but are being tucked further away.

2. New & Improved Features in Edge

Google Account Sign-In (05:50)

Soon, users will be able to sign into Edge with a Google account, allowing for seamless profile management across browsers.

"Soon we're going to be able to add like Gmail profiles, essentially Google account profiles. That's interesting." (Paul, 06:01)

Reading Mode Overhaul (Immersive Reader → Reading Mode) (06:20)

The Immersive Reader is now "Reading Mode", with a revamped icon but similar function.
Paul appreciates the distraction-free reading experience, customizable themes and robust 'Read Aloud' voices.

"It has really good voices. There's an incredible selection of very natural-sounding voices." (Paul, 07:43)

Copilot Integration (08:10 – 12:00)

On-Page AI Capabilities:
Includes summarization, explanation, translation, and live Copilot chat grounded in the article being read.
Copilot New Tab Page:
Option to enable a simplified, Copilot-themed new tab with AI-powered recommendations and tasks.

"If you want to go full-blown Copilot. And who doesn't?... You get this new look page... more of a full Copilot experience." (Paul, 09:48)
Model Auto-Selection:
Copilot smartly chooses the AI model based on the task, abstracting technical complexity away from the user.

Edge Search Bar (12:25)

New global Edge search bar (Win+Shift+F) allows searching from anywhere in Windows, with customizable search engine support (“it actually used Google to search for that. So that's actually pretty useful.”)

"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." (Paul, 12:33)

Media Control Improvements (13:40)

Updated media Control Center now handles multiple audio/video tabs, making it easy to pause, skip, or picture-in-picture from a single interface.

"I like this little...media Control center interface is actually very cool because it supports multiple tabs." (Paul, 14:35)

AI Theme Generator (14:55)

Users can generate unique themes via AI prompts. Although the demo stalls, Paul points out how this brings personalization front and center.

"You can type in a prompt...the dinosaur planet create the theme...it will change what the browser looks like." (Paul, 15:22)

Pain Points & Ongoing Frustrations

Forced Default Behavior:
Edge still forces itself as default for certain Windows links (widgets, search), regardless of user setting.

"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." (Paul, 15:46)
Tracking & Privacy:
Paul reiterates the need for privacy-focused browser extensions (“Strongly recommend Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin... just kind of cut down on the junk. You should do that in any browser. It's super important in Microsoft Edge.”) (16:35)
UI/UX Clutter:
While Microsoft claims to be "simplifying" Edge, Paul is skeptical real relief will be delivered quickly.
Insertification:
Paul remains critical of Microsoft's aggressive integration tactics:

"This is the big insertification problem, I think...they kind of went off the deep end with all of the junk they added to it." (Paul, 16:00)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

"You may recall [Edge] was originally kind of marketed as Google Chrome, but without the Google, which honestly sounds like kind of a neat idea to me." (Paul, 00:57)
"It's nice. It still doesn't support a way to automatically open articles this way. Some browsers do have that kind of thing." (Paul on Reading Mode, 07:03)
"Microsoft is making this [AI model choice] a little more plain English, but they're also leaving it as 'smart.' That will choose the right model on the back end depending on what you're doing." (Paul, 11:50)
"I've never seen a progress bar go backwards anyway..." (Paul's AI Theme Generator demo, 15:46)

Timestamps for Key Segments

00:45 — Intro and Edge’s 'baggage'
02:55 — Update schedule shifts
04:20 — Bloat, Collections & Sidebar removals
05:50 — Google account sign-in feature
06:20 — Reading Mode & Read Aloud updates
08:10 — Copilot features & new tab options
12:25 — Edge Search Bar demo
13:40 — Improved media control for multiple tabs
14:55 — AI theme generation
15:46 — Final thoughts on pain points, privacy, and ongoing frustrations

Tone & Takeaway

Paul is candid, witty, and slightly exasperated—balancing appreciation for Edge’s technical advancements with skepticism about Microsoft’s persistent pushy defaults and clutter. The episode offers a practical, user-centered tour of what's actually changing in Edge, with honest advice for power users and privacy-focused listeners.

Useful for anyone curious about Microsoft Edge 2026’s features, its ongoing evolution, and the very human experience of navigating modern browsers.

Loading summary

Transcript10 lines

[00:01]
Starbucks Frappuccino Advertiser
Morning decisions. How about a creamy mocha Frappuccino drink? Or sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe? Or white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Still waiting in line again, that's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with stamps.com over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with stamps.com join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Now print postage for certified mail, registered mail and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office for a limited time. Go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.
[00:45]
Paul Thurrott
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 Perrott and this week we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics. Not really, but Microsoft Edge, Microsoft's semi belly grid browser. This is the replacement for Internet Explorer. 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 insertified 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 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 Microsoft Edge. So this is Edge, this is kind of a default, honestly, fairly minimalist install of this thing. Normally there's a lot of garbage on the screen. I get rid of that immediately. I can't stand it, all that newsfeed stuff. But 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 Wingate Winget sometimes, interestingly, but. But it's. It has its own updating mechanism. They are moving to a new updating schedule. 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 four weeks, but in August or sometime later this year, they're going to switch to every two weeks, matching the Edge schedule, which, you know, makes sense. It's based on chromium, etc. But in a support document for the Release of version 150, the browser Microsoft just casually throw 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 is a little high, but, you know, this gigantic menu, you know, jumps off the bottom of the screen. You have to scroll through it if you find some of these sub menus 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 seven, eight 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. 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. So you get the idea of a sidebar, right. So it's this thing that pops over in 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, etc. And that's gone. But it's not just about getting rid of things. Microsoft is also adding new features to Edge and some of them are pretty interesting. So we'll take A look at those right after the break.
[04:51]
Accenture/Spotify Advertiser
This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more@accenture.com Spotify get business done with
[05:21]
American Express Advertiser
the new American Express Graphite Business Cash unlimited card with unlimited 2% cash back on all eligible purchases. Unlimited 5% cash back on flights and prepaid hotels booked through American Express. Travel online and a flexible spending capacity that can grow with your business. You'll have the confidence to keep building. Apply today and earn a welcome offer of $1,500 cash back after you spend $50,000 in qualifying purchases on your new card within the first six months of card membership terms. Apply. Learn more at GO MX Graphite Alrighty.
[05:51]
Paul Thurrott
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. You might know that inside of Edge you can set up multiple profiles. It could be any combination of like work and personal profiles. And right now this is not working. It just goes right to the sign in screen, which is how you sign in with Microsoft. So it's not there. And if I'm not mistaken, this thing probably. Yep, added, added a profile I did not want. But that's fin. 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, you know, that makes sense. 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, 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. It's nice. It still doesn't support a way to automatically open articles this way. Some browsers do have that kind of thing read aloud.
[07:36]
Accenture/Spotify Advertiser
OpenAI announces ChatGPT work in GPT 5.6 It's a big day for OpenAI with the release of Chat GPT.
[07:43]
Paul Thurrott
I'll just let that go now, sir. But you get the idea there. 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, etc. So that's kind of nice. 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, Goes right into Spanish. Nice. Put that back. And then it has summarize, explain, and then just chat with Copilot 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 years now. Whoops. Really? You. But the other two are a little more. Well, that is. I'm sorry, they are in fact cyber experiences. Okay, never mind. I thought they might be pop ups, but you get the idea. You can summarize, learn more, and then just kind of interact. And when you do the chat with co opilot1, 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. 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 ways. This is how you customize this page. I'm not going to do that. I've already made it, you know, pretty minimalist. 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 tap 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. This is almost like an attempt to like bypass your customizations. But that's not happening here, thank God. But that's fine if you want to go full blown Copilot. And who doesn't? 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. 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 cool pilot 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, etc. Sometimes these are based on what you've chatted with, but this is more of a full Copilot experience. You can do this from sidebar to. To many, 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 as 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 this is kind of interesting. So these are your options now with that kind of thing. I will, I will give them credit for this. By the way, a lot of these chatbot things have a 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 back end 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, etc. 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 Edge and then I'm going to pray a little bit because these things have a way of not working. But yeah, there we go. Perfect. So there is a. Maybe I did it wrong. Hold on. It's Windows Shift plus F. There we go. Brings up something called the Edge search bar. 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 can 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 a 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. 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, it just keeps coming back. So you can leave it on screen or not. 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. And then this, this one is. This is not an uncommon feature, but I just noticed this kind of recently. I wasn't aware that 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 on 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 for. Interestingly though, I can just go in here. I guess there is a mute that. And now and I'll just open another tab. Just make it less noisy here, less busy. 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 there 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 it's kind of cool. Cool is an ability to use AI to create a theme for the browser. 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. The default theme for like the co pilot 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. 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 borrow a prompt. So the dinosaur planet create the theme. It's going to take several seconds I guess, but once this is done, 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 and get back. Okay. It looks like I confused copilot.
[15:46]
Accenture/Spotify Advertiser
Wow.
[15:47]
Paul Thurrott
I've never seen a progress bar go backwards anyway, so I don't want to spend too much time on this. But you get the idea. So while this is doing its thing, I'll kind of wrap this up. So I will say pain points. I'm not sure I can claim that that's what they're doing. 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 you block Origin. I know it's been defanged a bit, but still very good. Ghost3ad block plus, etc. 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. All the standard coercions, etc. 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. Thank you so much to everyone, but especially to our Club Twit members. We love you. If you are not a member, you can learn more about that program at TWIT tv. Club Twit. We have a new episode of this podcast every Thursday. You can find out more about that at TWIT tv. How thank you. I'll see you next week. If you like what you heard and
[17:44]
American Express Advertiser
you want more of this week's top stories in tech, well, subscribe to Tech News Weekly. Every Thursday I talk with the journalists making and breaking the tech news.