Gadgetory

for a long time Microsoft souvenir excuse me venerable Internet Explorer was a lot like the cheeseburger on the menu at your local Chinese joint it was always just kind of there even though nearly everyone opted for Chrome Firefox or kung pao chicken instead and could you really blame them most popular alternatives to ie offered faster performance better compatibility and security and more useful features that left Internet Explorer in the dust so after seeing II's usage share drop-off for 12 straight years Microsoft decided it was time to abandon ship and build an entirely different browser called edge and even though the edge logo is suspiciously similar to that infamous e Microsoft has promised a faster browsing experience behind the scenes that plays nicely with modern websites but talk is cheap how is Microsoft going to deliver on its assurances of a better browser well similarly to how a game uses a rendering engine to make pretty pictures appear on your screen browsers use their own rendering engines to show you coherent web pages instead of a wall of garbled junk and Microsoft has developed an all-new engine called edge HTML which was originally developed from II's trident engine but has the old IE code removed which microsoft says will make modern web pages load faster and more accurately and speaking of making things faster edge also no longer supports ActiveX or browser helper objects those old internet explorer plugins that were notorious for being super susceptible to malware that could slow down your PC direct you to malicious websites or worse but on all the improvements are just behind the scenes stuff edge also has a new user interface that promises to be less clunky than IE for starters Microsoft has finally decided it's not a good idea to crowd together browser tabs and the address bar on the same line and has reserved the entire top of the screen for tabs like other modern browsers edge has also moved to a single menu scheme for changing options instead of the messy internet options box that has been with since freakin Windows 95 and I guess while that's all finding dandy Lynas hold on a second it sounds like edges purely playing catch-up with the other browsers here does it actually offer anything that I won't get with Chrome or Firefox as a matter of fact yes edge is trying to set itself apart from its competitors by offering additional functionality without the need for third-party browser extensions something that let's face it most non power users are not really using so namely you can annotate and markup web pages just by clicking a button at the top of the screen then you can share them or save them to OneNote pretty cool stuff and additionally edge features integration with Cortana the new Windows 10 personal assistant making it easy to quickly look up information about any topic you see on a web page use voice controls or even get things like driving directions or dinner reservations but despite all these improvements edge really ready for primetime although the new rendering engine should certainly deliver better performance our tests have shown it still legs behind Chrome and Firefox in a number of benchmarks and it still isn't as compliant with newer web standards like html5 as the competition and although a simpler UI will be a welcome change for many power users may find themselves frustrated at the rather lean options in the settings menu I mean even something as simple as the default download directory cannot be changed without a registry tweak so let us know in the comments can you live without right-click paste and go and give edge a chance as long as it means ie is finally going the way of Clippy or are you just going to stick with the other third-party browsers that you already know and love speaking of sticking with things we know and love we certainly talk about fresh books a lot on this channel and we're going to do it again today it's designed for freelance workers or small businesses and it makes invoicing getting paid and tracking your expenses easier with a simple online tool so all those little details about you know the hours worked on this job or your cash flow or other little accounting stuff like that that normally you'd have to get home at the long day and sit at your computer and work on no no that's all on your mobile device and it has a bunch of other great features out as well so you can show the full history of invoices you can check and see if your client has viewed the invoice and they can even pay you via credit card through fresh books so if you're your own boss you should be using stuff that makes you feel like a boss check it out now at fresh books comm slash tech quickie and don't forget to enter tech quickie in the how did you hear about a section so thanks for watching guys if you liked this video go ahead and click that like button if you disliked it well you know what to do also comment under the video if you have suggestions for future fast as possible episodes just like this one get subscribed and hey if you're looking for something else to watch right now we actually have our full video over on the Linus tech tips channel either out already or coming very soon where we go through their in-depth performance benchmarks that we ran on edge before shooting this video so check that out