Hands-On Windows 150 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Paul Thurrott
Coming up next on Hands-On Windows is a show I never thought I would record. I'm going to try to convince you to use Microsoft Edge Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands-On Windows. I'm Paul Thrott and this week is an unusual topic for me.

We've talked about Microsoft Edge a lot over the years. We've talked about how it's a problem. We've talked about how you should configure it correctly, whether you use it or not. I've been kind of down on Edge for years really, and the reason is because of all that insurretification stuff that's going on in Windows 11. And Edge in particular is kind of a vector for the bad behavior that we see in Windows 11. But beside that, there's something interesting happening with Edge that's been going on now for about a year, maybe a year and a half, where Microsoft has been doing the terrible stuff but also doing these things with Edge that are actually very interesting and make the browser more interesting.

To me as a user. The biggest one is they are rewriting all of the user interface components using a new technology called WebUI 2.0 instead of using the old kind of React-based user interface, and they have seen dramatic performance improvements as a result. So if you bring up Edge and you click on something like this extensions button, I'll bring up. What else would be a good example of this? Maybe just history or whatever. These are the types of interfaces that would come up really slowly in the past, and over time they've been slowly rewriting different parts of this and now, on average, across 13 browser features that they have converted, this thing is actually 40% faster, which is enormous. That's incredible to me. The other thing they've been doing, which is kind of contrary to the whole point of Edge in some ways, is getting rid of features that few people use, so they're actually debloating it a little bit. You know, edge is really feature-rich and that's interesting to me. So for that reason, those reasons, and because I have to work on the book and do the things I do for the site and for the podcast here, I've been using Edge more lately and I've actually found that I like it.

It's kind of a weird thing to say and look, the basics are all the same. It's based on Chromium, so it works like the browser that everyone uses. It works with all the same extensions, etc. It does everything that browsers do, but in addition to those performance benefits, which is really kind of a responsiveness improvement or whatever. I just wanted to highlight a few of the features that I think are not necessarily unique, in the sense that some other browsers do have these features, obviously, but are kind of marquee edge features that you may find of interest. So the first and most obvious let me go to a web article. I'll go to something that I wrote.

So Microsoft is integrating AI into its browser, which all the browser makers are doing to some degree, some radically and some a little more conservatively. Microsoft's approach is pretty conservative, but they do it through this edge sidebar, which, by default, is this co-pilot view, co-pilot, of course, being the name of Microsoft's AI, and this is literally the co-pilot experience, as Microsoft described it before we even had it, meaning it sits side by side with the thing that you're doing, and that's why having an AI of any kind in a browser actually makes at least some sense, because you can have it interact with the page you're looking at. So, for the most obvious, I'm sure we've done this over the past few months, but it can take the context of the thing you're looking at and then provide a summary. You don't have to paste in a URL or do anything strange, it will just do that thing, and so this is just an AI-based summary of this article, which isn't particularly long, but that's fine, and it's just there in the browser. It's not under the window, it's not something you have to switch context, it's just kind of there, which I think is really cool.

The second one this is one we do see pretty broadly In fact, I think even Chrome is now doing it. But you can enable vertical tabs, and this is interesting because we used to have these 16 by 9 screens that were really wide screen and more room. This way, now we have mostly 16 by 10 screens, but it's still pretty wide and you might want that vertical space rather than the horizontal space. So this browser only has a single tab open, but I'll just go to some Microsoft-friendly URL like that and I'll open Microsoft. And there's different ways you can configure this. You can have it like a short view, like this. You can pin it open, et cetera, et cetera. But this is one of those features where some people see this and say, yep, this is exactly what I want, and others will be like, eh, it's not exactly what I want. So that's up to you. You can go back and forth. I prefer the normal traditional view, but it's a feature that's there. It's cool.

Another one just in the sense that a browser is not just the most important application that we use, whether we're on Windows or any desktop system or on mobile. It's sort of an internet operating system in a way. There are apps that run on the web. A lot of us run these apps and you can run them side by side and you can do that with two Windows. But with Edge and a few other browsers too, right, you can do those things just side by side-side right in the browser with a split-screen view.

Now, this isn't going to be a great demo, but you could imagine that I might bring up some kind of an editor like Microsoft Word on the web or Google Docs or whatever, and maybe I'm taking notes based on something I'm seeing over here on the left. Or maybe I'm watching a YouTube video and I'm taking notes or writing whatever on the left. Or maybe I'm watching a YouTube video and I'm taking notes or writing whatever and I guess I only type part of Microsoft there somehow. But you get the idea. You can split these things up. You get little menus on either side where you can change these to different positions. You can switch to a vertical split, which is really cool, and then just close one to go back to the normal view, so really interesting, especially on a bigger screen. I'm doing this on a laptop screen. It's not the greatest experience, but if you have a 24, 27 bigger screen, unbelievable. Slightly less, I guess, productive, although I think this factors into just how you feel about the browser.

Really nice customization features in the browser. A lot of browsers have these things. You can go in and choose themes and all that kind of stuff. But Microsoft has an AI theme generator that I actually really like. So the only thing I don XP, and it will take a moment here to do this, but it's not just going to create something that will impact the color around the what we call the browser Chrome, but it also will impact the wallpaper that you see on the default new tab screen if you're using that, and so hopefully this thing will pop up eventually, but it takes a little while.

There we go, so you can choose the accent color here After you get this design. I'll just pick this one, apply the theme and I will apply that, and that's fine, and so you can see the color up here. I mean in a normal browser view like this. You know, not that dramatic, but when you go to this screen which is covered up with gunk and we're going to talk about this in a future episode but you can see that background back there and if you clean this screen up, which you can do through the settings here, you can see more of that. It's just kind of a nice thing. So when we go back here, you can see it's in there.

I wish you could save it. This is the only problem. This is a one-off it's. You know, get a different computer, you're not going to get this. You could generate a new theme. This won't be sitting here waiting for you to go back to. It's a little bit unfortunate, but it is kind of a. It's a really neat feature and I think it's really unique. So I will leave that on and then let me go back to a article view.

I take a lot of screenshots. That's the nature of what I do, so let me find a long article like this thing here and bring this up, and so you can take screenshots of the system. We talk a lot about the snipping tool in Windows 11, but Microsoft Edge has its own screenshot tool and because this is kind of a low res screen, it's off on this little sub-menu, but normally it's out here in the main menu and when you select this you get these different choices, but the one I really like here is capture full page, and what this will do is literally capture the entire page, not just the part you see on screen. So I'll just save that to disk and when you look at this file you should probably just open up full screen. I would imagine you can see that what it is is this gigantic. If it ever comes up, here we go oh I haven't run this app yet. Give me one moment. Skip, skip, skip. I'll skip through that and I'll just F11 this and get rid of all the little extra stuff. I'll just do that one more time, I guess. Yeah, open the file. It should just open now automatically and, yes, you'll see a full-screen view. But it's this enormous tall image. Eventually, there you go. You can see how big this thing is. Maybe I picked a radically tall example, but this is pretty unique.

I used to turn to third-party utilities for this and I really like that. You can just do this right in the browser itself. It's kind of a cool thing. I mentioned in passing earlier that you can use your extensions from Chrome. Microsoft does have its own extension store, of course, which is on the web here. So this is the Edge extension store. But if you go into this interface for extensions manage extensions it will have an option here that says you can also use them from other stores, and so all you have to do is just look where it is Chrome Web Store, go there and then, if you find an, if there's an extension that's in the Chrome Web Store but it's not in, I don't know why I'm clicking around. I don't have to install any extensions, but let's pretend I wanted to get this one. I could install this right in Edge, even though it's not Chrome right, because it's based on Chromium. So that's actually kind of a plus and it eases the transition if you are going to adopt Microsoft Edge, as you might want to.

So I'm going to follow this up with a couple more episodes. One is the way that you should configure the browser if you're going to use it. We'll do that one next. We've talked about this in the past. It is in the Windows 11 field guide, but I have a more detailed view of the configuration changes that I think you should make. So we'll go through that next time. And then after that, I want to talk about what happens if you don't want to use Edge because this is running in the background and doing things, and if you're going to be using Chrome or Brave or whatever, or the browser. There's actually several things you should do to configure Windows 11 so that this thing isn't happening in the background, right, because this is taking up resources and redirecting you to other things. So that'll be the next couple of episodes. We'll get there.

So thank you so much. I hope you found this interesting. Maybe I converted a couple of you. I guess we'll see. I think using the built-in browser, if it works well enough, is not a horrible idea, but there are issues and again we'll get to that and we will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at twittv. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially, as always, to our Club Twit members. If you are not a Club Twit member, please do give it a look and think about subscribing. It helps everyone here at. You know everyone who's making these shows and obviously Twit itself. So please do support us if you can, and I will see you next time.