Staying private and protected while browsing the web is more of a concern than ever, and Microsoft has responded by building some comprehensive but easy-to-use privacy features into the new Edge. Open the browser menu, click Settings, then choose Privacy and Services to find the three levels of privacy Edge offers.
You can pick among Basic, Balanced, or Strict, which as you might have guessed take an increasingly aggressive approach to what websites can do on your computer. The Strict level makes it harder for sites and advertisers to build up a profile about you, but it’s so severe that you might notice some bugs and broken functions in the websites that you use.
Read Easier
Cut out the clutter and focus on what’s important by switching on Immersive Reader, a feature that cuts out just about everything except the text and the images of a page. It leaves out distractions like advertising or side panels. On pages where the view is available, you’ll see an icon that looks like a book in the address bar at the top of the Edge interface.
Hover the mouse over the icon and it’ll say Enter Immersive Reader; click on it, and you’ll get a simplified, stripped-down view of the page you were just viewing. You can adjust the colors of the page and the size of the text via the Text Preference box, and you can even have the text on the page read aloud to you by clicking on the Read Aloud button.
Fine-Tune Your Tabs
You’re going to be spending a lot of time looking at newly opened tabs, so it makes sense to get them set up the way you want. Edge asks you to make some customizations the first time you launch the browser, but you can always find these settings later via the cog icon—top right on the new tab page—or through Settings and New Tab Page on the Edge menu.
You have four options here. Pick Focused for simple, clutter-free access to your bookmarks and a web search; go with Inspirational to add a background image; choose Informational to add some feeds from Microsoft News. If you select Custom, you can tweak some of the elements on the page individually, like the background image.
Sync Your Devices
