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Last year, the small private university where I work purchased new laptops for the staff and I was charged with deploying them, a process that had me visiting over a hundred employee to help them back up and migrate their documents and settings, Including browser bookmarks. One of the first questions I asked each person was “What browser do you use?” Almost all of them told me Google Chrome. A few holdouts used Firefox and only one or two named Edge…and they weren’t the power users if you know what I mean.

I came to work at the university after being retired from the public school system for a couple of years. During my career I primarily supported Macs and I’d used one myself since the days of OS 9. This was my first extended experience working in a Microsoft centric environment. There are a few Macs on campus but overwhelmingly our users are PC based. When I started, I was assigned a Dell AIO desktop with Windows 10. I intuited that Edge had good integration with Microsoft 365, so I chose to use it despite having been primarily a Safari and Chrome user in the past. I can use any browser I want. My coworkers in the IT department use Brave, Firefox and Chrome but after my initial choice I’ve decided to stick with Edge and have in fact made it my default browser on my iPhone and my new M2 MacBook Air.

Why, you ask? Because despite what the world seems to believe, Edge really doesn’t suck. In fact, it’s variety of features make it one of my favorite pieces of software to use. Is it perfect? No. Like most Chromium based browsers it’s a memory hog. As a heavy user of Apple’s Shortcuts app on my phone and Mac, I find that most browser related workflows are written for Safari and don’t work as well in Edge. Still, the good overwhelmingly outweighs the bad. Edge has quite a few features that are cutting edge, if not unique.

Profiles

I have separate profiles for home and work. At work Edge, when signed into Microsoft 365 is managed, meaning I can install no extensions and save no passwords, but I do have ready access to all my documents in OneDrive, my Outlook email accounts our campus Intranet and more. I have a set of work-related bookmarks I use with this profile. I simultaneously open another browser window signed into a different Microsoft account and voila, I then have access to all my extensions, a different set of bookmarks and my bookmark manager of choice, LastPass, which also holds my credit card info in case I need to buy anything through the browser. I use the same personal profile at home so I can save things I want to reference at work in my extra browser window.

Workspaces

Within a profile, users can create collections, browser setups for unique use cases. I have one for general browsing with my go to collection of bookmarks in the bookmark (or favorites as Edge calls them) bar. I have another setup for blogging with a different set of bookmarks available in the bookmarks bar. Both workspaces share the same general set of bookmarks from the menu bar or toolbar button, so I don’t have to worry about syncing two collections. Tabs can be set to be remembered between sessions, so when I’m ready to work on a blog entry, I have tabs for Micro.blog omg.lol, and my Mastodon account. It’s all really handy and allows me to just open up the browser and go to work.

Extensions

Edge can use the same extensions available to Google Chrome and there’s a vast selection to choose from. I don’t find that running all the extensions I need slows Edge down appreciably, so I install what I need. Extensions are specific to the profile you are using, but workspaces within the same profile share the same extensions. You can create a different Mac and PC profile is you find yourself using extensions that are platform specific. Here’s what I use:

  • Lastpass - I’ve had a paid account shared with my wife for more than a decade. Lastpass has gotten some bad PR due to a couple of incidents, but I haven’t had any issues.
  • Omnivore - It’s the best read it later service around these days, featuring a mobile app with read aloud capability, newsletter subscription service, RSS feeds and a browser extension.
  • Obsidian Web Clipper - I primarily use a bookmarklet for saving web content into Drafts on my Mac, but I use a different vault at work on my PC where Drafts isn’t available.
  • Perplexity - Although one of the unique features of Edge is the built-in access to Chat-GPT4, I like to use Perplexity as well. It’s a popular extension with over 200K downloads.
  • Raindrop.io - I have a subscription and heartily endorse Raindrop.io for it’s cross platform support as well as it’s Evernote and IFTTT integration which really helps me when I’m researching anything
  • Evernote Web Clipper - I’ve been a paid Evernote user since 2009 and don’t see myself ever completely stepping aweay from the product even though I do a lot with Obsidian these days.
  • Aboard - This is the extension for the app my wife and I use to share links with each other. When I find an app, a TV show, a news story or whatever, I put it into Aboard and she gets a notification and can check it out when she has time. It’s free and useful.
  • Chrome Remote Desktop - This allows me to access my home computer from other locations. It’s free, easy to set up and use and reliable. I don’t know what people pay for Screens or TeamViewer subscriptions.
  • UBlock Origin- The best ad blocker on the planet. 31,000,000 downloads can’t be wrong.
  • Toby - My new tab extension. It makes it easy to save and open windows full of tabs on the go. I use the free version and even though I maintain my start.me page, I stick with Toby for new tabs.
  • Velja - Works in conjunction with the Mac app of the same name to open URLs in other bowsers and apps (e.g., Slack, Teams, Zoom, Freetube etc)

Collections

One of the features in Edge I find really useful is available on the desktop and mobile version of the browser. You can create collections of bookmarks on the fly for things you want to investigate later but don’t necessarily want to save forever. I have five collections:

  • Shopping - this is mostly a collection of Amazon pages I can keep separate from my Amazon wish list so my wife can’t see what I was thinking of getting her for her birthday
  • Software - I’m an unembarrassed software nerd, always looking for the latest cool program to try out. I keep a running collection of pages of programs I want to look at.
  • Windows - Most of my leisure browsing happens on my mac, but when I find something that might be useful on my day job, I save it to my Windows collection to investigate at work
  • TV - When I come across a review of an upcoming television show, I add it to this collection. Once a week I read all the emails from streaming services and the web pages I’ve collected and i cultivate the viewing list for my wife and I
  • Reading List - I use a read it later app (Omnivore) but sometimes I just add a news article or How-to guide to my reading list collection if it’s something I know I’ll just read in my browser.

Other features I like

As I mentioned earlier, one of the best kept secrets of using a computer in 2024 is the free access to Chat-GPT4 built into Bing/CoPilot. There are people out there paying $20 a month to do what they can do for free with CoPilot and it’s built right into Edge. I personally have an API subscription to Open.AI, which runs me about a dollar a month so I can use the API key in other apps like Raycast and Obsidian.

The mobile version of Edge is good enough to be my default browser in iOS 17. Edge has a feature to send tabs to other devices and I use it all the time between my work computer, phone and MacBook at home. I have full access to my browser bookmarks on my phone as well as my history. Since I use Lastpass for passwords, I don’t worry about browser saved passwords.

I know that Safari introduced profiles last year with the release of Sonoma and I know Chrome has access to the same browser extensions, but I just find that in my environment - Windows at work, Mac at home and consistent iPhone use, Edge has a set of features that work reliably for me. The browser receives constant updates and allows users to download separate beta and canary versions if they want. Hopefully you’ve found something in this review that might give you a reason to give Edge a tryout.

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