SECOND OPINION

I get where Tim’s coming from in his fulsome praise for the new Edge – in isolation it is a perfectly good browser. But heaping praise on Microsoft for Edge is a bit like lauding the person who puts together a Beatles Greatest Hits album instead of Lennon and McCartney. There’s nothing here – literally nothing – that hasn’t been done by other browser makers before.

The new privacy modes are almost a direct lift from Firefox, except not quite as detailed. And if Microsoft is suddenly going to take the high ground on privacy and block trackers from sites you haven’t visited by default, perhaps it should get its own house in order first. When I visit Microsoft.com in Firefox, for instance, I can click on the shield in the address bar to discover that Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is among the cross-site tracking cookies that are blocked. (To be fair, Edge reveals LinkedIn is on my tail too, although it’s less detailed about precisely how.)

The extensions system is a typical Microsoft kludge, where it’s trying to mask the fact you actually have full access to the Chrome Web Store and makes you jump through hoops to get it. The Immersive Reader mode doesn’t work on some sites, such as forums, where ads can plague the reading experience. Firefox’s does.

But perhaps most dispiriting of all is the lack of anything to set it apart, no features that make using Microsoft’s own services any easier. If I click on a phone number in Chrome, for instance, it offers to dial it on my Android phone. If I do the same in Edge, the best I get is an offer to use FaceTime – not even Skype, which is installed on my Mac.

Maybe Microsoft will develop more features over time. As it stands, I’m yet to see a single compelling reason to switch.