The new Edge
If you’ve been letting your Windows update in the last few months, you may have noticed that, as part of the regular Windows update schedule, a new version of Microsoft’s Edge browser has appeared. You might have dismissed it out of hand – but you shouldn’t. The updated version of Edge is finally the browser we wanted from Microsoft. It feels like Microsoft has finally started asking the question “how do we create the best browser we can?” rather than “how can we leverage our Windows monopoly to control the internet?”. It’s not flawless, and many people are upset that they weren’t given a choice to download it or to not have it installed, but for our part we’re pretty happy with it.
It’s a better browser than its predecessor in terms of performance, usability and customisability. It beats Chrome now in terms of security options as well, with a lot more options to configure than Chrome’s basic settings. It has a cool new editor function, which helps with typing in a fashion similar to Grammarly, a useful read aloud feature and the capacity to stream pages to Miracast and DLNA devices (similar to the way Chrome does to Chromecast).
And since like Chrome it’s based on Chromium, it’s pretty much a wash between the two when it comes to performance.
This being the privacy and security column, we thought we’d take a look at some of its new features and help you best configure it for maximum security.
Not so yummy cookies
The new Edge provides significantly more power over tracking and other cookies than Chrome or older versions of Edge.
It doesn’t just give you the option to allow or disallow cookies on a given site, or to broadly block third party cookies. Instead it provides a custom setup, with blocking of specific known tracking cookies in a fashion that’s somewhat similar to Disconnect or Ghostery – though not quite as comprehensively as those extensions. It will block social media trackers as well as advertising trackers, and you can fine tune what is and isn’t allowed.
If you visit a site with trackers, then next to the site address you’ll see the padlock icon. If you click on it, it will show the settings for that site, as well as any trackers that it might be blocking. From the drop down menu, you can turn down settings for that particular site.
You can and should set your global settings by clicking on the ellipsis in the top right corner and selecting Settings. Then head to Privacy and services. Under tracking prevention you are given three options (Basic/Balanced/ Strict). Balanced is the default, but we would recommend Strict – very few sites are going to be ‘broken’ by it, and you can always change the settings for a specific site if you need to make it work.
You can also use this panel to see what trackers it has blocked – click on Blocked trackers – and to see and manage the sites for which you’ve created an exception – click Exceptions.
There are two more settings you should look at here. One is Do Not Track. Scroll down under Privacy and enable the Send “Do Not Track” requests. Do Not Track is honestly weak sauce, since the sites themselves have to opt in (it’s basically a way of asking nicely not to track you, but the site can choose whether or not it will obey), but it doesn’t cause any harm.
The other is found by clicking on Site Permissions in the left hand panel, and then on the top option: Cookies and site data. Third party cookies are enabled by default (or rather, blocking of third party cookies is disabled), but you should switch the Block third-party cookies option to On. Here you can also blacklist or whitelist sites
page, under Services.
This feature detects disreputable apps similar to the way many anti-malware applications do. If you (or, more likely, your kids or other family members) try to download a cryptocurrency miner, a piece of software with known spyware or other tool that most people wouldn’t want on their system, it will give a warning that hey, this software is not reputable and should be avoided.
Changing your search engine
To its credit, much like Chrome the new Edge does give you considerable options to manage your search engine, including the one used for searches typed into the address bar.
Under Services, click on Address Bar to configure your default search engine. We’d recommend DuckDuckGo since it has a no tracking, no logs policy, but you can also choose Google, Bing or even sites like YouTube.
Integration with family safety
Microsoft Family Safety is something we’ve covered pretty extensively (see the Home Networking column in the June issue), and Edge continues to be tightly integrated with the service, allowing extensive tracking and control over what your kids are doing online.
You can get started by opening the Settings in Edge and clicking on Family safety on the left.
More extension options
Perhaps our favourite thing about the new browser is its support for extensions. Now that it uses Chromium, you can use extensions downloaded from both the Microsoft Store (which is the default if you click on ‘Get extensions for Microsoft Edge’) and the Chrome Web Store (which you will have to visit manually).
You’ll find most of the major extensions in the Microsoft Store – including many you cannot find on the Chrome store thanks to Google restrictions. Video downloaders, for example, are somewhat restricted on the
Chrome store (since Google thinks they mess with its business model), but are readily available on the Microsoft Store. And if something isn’t available on the Microsoft store, go to chrome. google.com/webstore/category/ extensions and download from there (you’ll see an option when you go there to enable extensions from other stores which you’ll have to click on).
We’d still recommend an ad blocker like uBlock and an anti-tracking tool like Disconnect. The new Edge does have some ad blocking built in (which you might have noticed in the Site permissions page in settings), but only ads that Microsoft deems excessive. And while we like the new anti-tracking tool, it’s still not as comprehensive as something like Ghostery or Disconnect. That said, we’re very happy that Microsoft has improved its baseline security and privacy and, if only for that alone, it’s worth checking out the new browser.