Are you stuck with Mozilla firefox and Chrome? You may have given up on Microsoft web browsers after the bad experiencing of Internet Explorer, the ultimate rubbish that drove many people to alternatives like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
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Now hear me out. In this day and age, Microsoft Edge is packed with a lot of features that can help ease your everyday life on the internet. When I say a lot of features doesn’t mean poor performance. Even though Microsoft Edge has so many features compared to its counterpart, its performance is a no brainer.
Rather than upgrading Internet Explorer, Microsoft decided to build Edge from scratch. Though some of its features are borrowed from other popular web browsers like Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, it has a few unique features as well. It was initially launched in 2015 with Windows 10 but was rebuilt four years later using the same open-source Chromium code that Google Chrome uses.
If downloading Chrome or Firefox is the first thing you do on your new computer, I’m going to give you a few convincing reasons why you must stick with Microsoft Edge since it’s comes pre-installed with Windows.
1. Organize your research or Information with Collections
Collections allow you to easily collect information from different websites, organize it, export it into various files or just come back to your research at a later time and pick up right where you left off. Today it can be difficult to do this — especially across a large number of different websites and multiple devices.
In order to access the collection feature, you can use ctrl + shift + Y or click on the button at the right corner.
In my case, I don’t have any collections yet, you might also have the same empty collection. Now the first thing you must do is to rename the new collection to any name of your choice.
You can now easily add any website to your collection once you are on any website by clicking on add current page or add the links of the website by dragging them over to the collection area and they will automatically be added to your collection.
Let’s say you are on a website and you find a list of highlighted text you want to keep somewhere for future reference. You can simply highlight the text and drag it to your collection and it will be added to your collection.
You can also add an image that may be of a place you would want to visit by dragging it to your collection.
To delete something from the collection, right-click on the item and click delete. You can also rearrange the items in the collection by dragging them to your preferred position.
You can create as many collections for different topics as you want by clicking the back button on your current collection and select start new collection.
There are a couple of hidden features in the collection. When you click on the three dots in your currently open collection, you can export and send your collection to Exel, OneNote, Word and even Pinterest.
2. Read and Annotate PDF Files
Just like many other browsers, Microsoft Edge comes with a built-in PDF reader but with Edge, you can also annotate the PDF files with ink and highlighting.
With read aloud, you can let Edge read the document to you. This works for all true PDFs but not for scanned PDFs. In the Beta version of Edge, you can select different natural voices but they will be available to everyone soon.
3. Create Websites as Apps
Microsoft Edge allows you to create web apps for the websites that you visit. Now I use this for a few websites that I visit every day that don’t have apps. Now, this allows you to open the pages directly from your desktop without having to open your browser.
To create a web app, start by navigating to the website. Click the ellipsis icon at the top-left of your browser and select Settings > Apps > Install this site as an app. Save this app with your preferred name.
Once this is completed the tap is going to close and a new window is going to open for that website. You can pin it to your taskbar or you can launch it from the start menu.
For managing the web apps you’ve installed, click on the ellipsis and navigate to Settings > Apps > Manage Apps. Here, you can uninstall the app, pin it to your Start Menu or Desktop, or view site permissions.
4. Web Capture and Annotate the Web
With the new web capture feature, you can create annotate screenshots. With Web Capture, you can not only capture the visible portion of the webpage, but you can scroll further down the page to include as much content from the webpage as you want.
Let’s say you are on a website that you would want to capture as a screenshot, you can either click on the ellipsis and click select Web capture or you can use the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + S.
This is going to bring up a little toolbar, you can either capture a certain area of the web page or if you want you can create a screenshot of the full page. And that is it, now you have the scrollable screenshot.
You can annotate this by using the pen tool. Once you are done, save it, copy it or share it with others.
5. Multi-User Functionality
With this multi-user functionality, you can easily create and access different work account. It is a great way to keep your personal and work environment separate. Now in the upper right corner, you can see your profile. Click it to get to your profile settings.
To set up a new profile, just click on the add profile button.
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