Advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft Edge

Microsoft has been busy pushing the Microsoft Edge browser to its users this year, and that’s sure to get worse with the arrival of Windows 11 in October. Is Edge a much smaller browser than Chrome, or do you simply have to get used to it? Here are the advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft Edge.

Advantage: Browser uses less memory

In general, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome are more or less equal. Both are very fast on the basics and offer almost the same browsing experience. However, there are things Microsoft Edge does better, which is memory usage. Edge appears to use about half of the memory Chrome needs. A bit embarrassing, because Chrome has always been known as the light browser.

Disadvantage: Much less extensions

Chrome is known for its extension for every nuisance and activity. During the release of the new Star Wars movie, you can even turn all the information about Star Wars into pictures of cats so they don’t spoil you. There are exotic extensions and especially many very useful plugins. Edge has these as well, but not nearly as many. You can use extensions from the Chrome Store, but you have to set that up manually. The number of extensions will likely also grow within Edge, but as long as developers know they work through Chrome, they may be less inclined to migrate to Edge.

Feature: Save a set of pages at once

It’s really strange that Chrome doesn’t offer it the same way, but Edge can create a group of several web pages at once. You can also name it so that you can open a whole set of tabs at once. Very useful if you use your laptop for business and private, for example, because you can then create a business group and one group with all your favorite personal pages.

Downside: Can’t sync often

You can really sync everything inside Chrome, so you have the same experience on every system you use, but above all you can use the same extensions and you don’t have to enter passwords you’ve saved anywhere. Edge will likely sync as well eventually, but at the moment those options are a bit more limited than Google’s browser. As an extension of this, Chrome can also be used on more different platforms, while Edge still has to find its way around a bit. On the other hand, Microsoft is making progress: this month it became clear that Edge on Linux is stable.

Feature: better access

Edge has many features that make the browser more accessible to people who, for example, have vision problems. For example, there is the read aloud function where the browser reads to you everything that is on the web page. The special thing is that it is not read as if you are listening to a bot, but rather it is read naturally.

Disadvantage: Payment deferred payment

Microsoft Edge has been in the news a lot in recent days because it’s very fanatical about the introduction of Zip, at least in the US. Zip is a service that allows you to defer payment. This is a buy now, pay later option that irritates users because it is not a free platform in the first place. Each payment you make costs $1: you have to pay the money in four payments within six weeks, so you’ll lose $4 anyway. That’s not the only annoying thing: this bloatware will slow down your browsing considerably. It’s unknown if Microsoft will do anything about it, but it does allow stores to contact you if they don’t want to zip on their checkout page.

Advantage: Security will be better in order

Google is known as the company that doesn’t take the privacy of its users very closely, and certainly when it comes to data, it is one of the most powerful companies on the planet. Microsoft has taken a smart approach in this regard with Edge, as it offers more possibilities to affect your privacy. Edge can block trackers from sites, regardless of whether you’ve visited that site before or not. You also have multiple levels of tracking to choose from, as well as adjusting how much personal information sites are allowed to know about you. Best of all, Microsoft makes sure you don’t have to bother looking for these features: they are much less hidden than those in Chrome.

Microsoft Edge

Edge is still a fairly new browser and we need to give Microsoft time to improve it. Still, there’s a lot to love, especially when it comes to how demanding the browser is of your memory and how open it is to privacy, although there’s always room for improvement, of course. Now that more and more systems are switching to Windows 12, it’s expected that more people will also try to use the Edge browser, so it’s good to know what you can and should not expect from it.