Hands-On Windows 152 transcript

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0:00:00 - Paul Thurrott
Coming up next on Hands-On Windows. I heard your complaints. This week we're going to teach you how not to use Microsoft Edge and how to best configure Windows 11 for that scenario Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands-On Windows, paul Thrott, and this week we're going to look at Microsoft Edge again, except from a different perspective.

I've been using Edge a lot lately, but I know a lot of people don't Most people don't, and that's fine, right. Most people will run Edge one time, use it to install Google Chrome, probably and then never think about it again. And that's okay, except for a couple of things. One, edge is still running in the background and two, it's going to pop up regardless, right. There are going to be certain things that you do, for example, search highlights when you go off the search button. That's not the search button. When you start searching here, you'll get search results from Bing in this case are going to launch in Microsoft Edge and I just closed it there. But the widgets interface same thing. If you find a story in here you like somehow which I'm not saying is impossible, but it's mostly impossible that thing will also run in Edge, even if you've configured Chrome or whatever other browser as the default. So there are. And then there's also just harassment, right. Every once in a while, microsoft will pop up and say hey, we noticed, you're not using Edge. Use dry Edge. Edge is a great browser. How come you're not using Edge? And so there are some things you can do. It's never going to be 100% perfect. Microsoft also kind of moves the goal line a little bit from time to time, but sitting here in roughly mid-2025, these are the things you should do if you're going to use Windows 11, but you're definitely not going to be using Microsoft Edge.

Okay, so the first is to configure a different browser as your default browser. That sounds pretty obvious, but if you run a browser like this is Brave, here it will come up with this thing. I could click that, but instead I'm going to show you the other way, because you might not see that little button because it's not always there. If you go to apps and then default apps and the settings app in Windows, and then you have to scroll down, I'll wait for this thing to catch up. Find the browser that you want to use, so I'll go to Brave again. Sorry, this interface has changed a little bit right. They've added these links up here, which is kind of fun, but you can make this the default, and this is new. In fact, this is technically only available on the EU. I'm going to explain that one in a little while. But there's also this button.

But what you would typically do is just go down to here and say, okay, I'm going to use brave for all of the typical web links, but also for pdfs, right? So if I double click on the pdf, it's going to open. That you can see. It's not everything, and I'm actually getting a fairly ideal um view of this. If you're in the United States, if you're anywhere other than Europe, there's actually usually fewer things clicked or selected there for you. We'll get to that in a minute, but you might want to go through this list and just make sure everything's there.

Okay. So that's good. But, like I said, edge is still going to run, right. So let me bring up the terrible widgets interface. We'll give this thing a little test. Slowly it moves Okay. Close encounter with a great white shark, fantastic.

So when you click that oh, I'm sorry, I've already made this change in the background, so that loaded in Brave, which is what I want, but that's not typically the way the system works right, and the reason is I'm using a third-party utility called MS Edge Direct, which you can Google or Bing and download. It's free. It's also open source, yeah, so it's running in the background. So what this is doing is intercepting the system level calls. That would normally have it go and use Edge, even when you said you wanted to use Brave or Chrome or whatever browsers. That's extremely useful. I think it is. Let's see Edge. What does it call it Direct? Oh, because this can't work properly, because everything is terrible.

This is the app here, and there's a couple of interfaces and a couple of different ways that you can run this thing, but the one that you want is the one that I have enabled, active mode, and it just means it's going to run at startup, it's going to run in the background and it's just going to sit there and intercept, right, all of those things. So that's good, but Edge is still running in the background, right, and so actually I was going to close this, but I need this. So if you go to apps again in the settings app and then startup, you could also use task manager. If you're a little more old school. You get a very similar interface in this app here, right, yep, and this is but a little harder to see, so I'll use this one. This is going to show you all of the apps that are running automatically when the computer boots or when you sign into Windows, right, so you can sort it so that the ones that are running so we've got a Brave update are running. That's fantastic.

Discord is like a piece of malware that runs even when you tell it not to. That's fine, but running, that's fantastic. Discord is like a piece of malware that runs even when you tell it not to. That's fine. But you can see Microsoft Edge is here. So if I'm going to use Brave, turn this off right, and you think, well, okay, that's great, I've done this, but not exactly. So Edge again, unless you've done that third-party utility I mentioned earlier still going to run sometimes, and Edge is in fact running right here. So let me bring this up and it's already freaking out because it's not the default. That's okay, it will be okay.

But you also want to go into system and performance, probably, system, yeah, startup boost this. What this does is it preloads sites based on what you've done in the past, maybe what you bookmarks, you have in the new tab screen, etc. Etc. There's also options in here if you have web apps that you maybe installed with Microsoft Edge. You actually would want to leave that running, but I would disable this in this case. So Startup Boost and then taking it out of the startup apps. Those are the two main ones that you should do. You're not going to use Edge. Don't let it run in the background.

The other thing you could do is something that we talked about it was a couple of episodes ago, maybe five, six episodes ago which is use that when toys utility right, and that that might be why that is why I should say why we saw those extra features in the default apps interface Right, and so when you go into the system interface here, there's a bunch of stuff here, but one of them is this digital markets app thing, and so this gets reset from time to time. But I did enable this, and I think this is why I saw what happened. It's telling me I need to reboot here. But enable this, reboot your computer and then you'll have the experience that you could have as a European, even if you live somewhere else, and that means there's additional capabilities that are not made available to the rest of the world, that Microsoft does in Europe because they want to comply with the Digital Markets Act regulations, right. So that interface that I showed earlier is one of them. Let's go back again so you can see that again, because that's not something you wrong one, not typically something you see in the United States, where I well, actually I'm in Mexico, but you don't typically see it anywhere other than Europe. But these choices, and then this button here, these are all things that are just available typically in Europe. So, because I'm running WinToys, because I enabled a feature earlier, that's why I was seeing that, but that's not the only thing you could.

Also, this is a little extreme, but now you get an uninstall option on Edge, which is also something we don't get in the United States or in the rest of the world. I'm not 100% sure. I recommend uninstalling it, mostly because it's actually a pretty good idea to have another browser on your computer, even if you're just going to use Chrome or whatever it is all the time, just as a backup. Just as sometimes you want to maybe have two sign-ins to the same service, like a Google service, maybe use one for one and one for the other or whatever. There are different scenarios where this actually makes sense. I do this in part because of PayPal, for example. I have two PayPal accounts so I can sign into one in one system and the other on the other.

But if you want to be radical about it, you could uninstall Edge. You can uninstall other things because of that Digital Market Act compliance. I think the Microsoft Store is one of those things where you couldn't typically do that in the United States or elsewhere, but thanks to that utility, which is really cool, you can. So that's probably most of it. Whatever browser you're using now, edge is really good. We talked about that EFS site. Cover your Tracks. Default install of Edge passes that thing with flying colors. But if you're running Chrome, firefox, whatever other browser, make sure you install the proper extensions to prevent tracking as well, especially Chrome. Strongly recommend Privacy Badger and Adblock Plus. Like I said a couple episodes ago, those things work across all those browsers, so that's smart too. So that's most of it you could exercise.

If you will Edge from your system, I recommend just kind of patting it down a little bit. It's likely over time you will occasionally see something. Hey, notice, you're not using Edge, like it may still badge you a little bit and, like I said, microsoft kind of changes the rules here and there because they really do want you to use Edge. But the way I have this configured right now, honestly I think would be pretty clean. So I'll leave it like this for a little while, see what happens, but I think this is going to be pretty good. So if you don't want Edge, that's how you do it. Well, thank you for watching. Hopefully this was useful. We will have a new episode of Hands-On Windows every Thursday. You can learn more at twittv slash h-o-w. Thank you for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you. If you're not a member, please twittv slash club twit. Give it a look. Think about supporting the company and all the content creators, and I appreciate it. Thank you, I'll see you next week.