By now some of you have upgraded to Windows 10.  For the most part we have seen seamless upgrades.  There have been a few hiccups though, so if you haven’t yet, we might recommend waiting a little longer to let it “cook” a bit more.  Bear in mind that you have almost a full year to upgrade for free if you’re running Windows 7 or 8.  We previously wrote about that here.

Windows 10 has a new browser called Microsoft Edge, and it’s clean, fast, and more intuitive than Internet Explorer ever was. The Edge browser isn’t totally complete yet – more features like adding plugins will be added in the coming months.

Still, it’s a refreshing change for Windows, and there are different settings you can tweak to make it work how you want.  Here’s a few of them:

Accessing the Settings menu in Edge

The Settings menu in Edge is quite comprehensive and, to a certain extent, allows you to customize the browser to your own liking. You access the settings menu by simply clicking the three horizontal dots at the far right of the top menu.

Open Edge Browser to Multiple Webpages

From Settings, scroll down a bit and find the Open with section and select A specific page or pages. Then click the dropdown menu and select Custom.

Then add the sites you want to have Edge open with.  Now when you open Edge, each of the sites you added will open up in different tabs. The last site you add will be the one that is displayed when you first launch Edge.

Import Favourites into Edge

From Settings, you can also import favourites into Edge but only from another browser installed in Windows 10.  Unfortunately, at this point in time, there appears to be no way to import favourites from an HTML file. However, if you’ve previously saved your favourites (or bookmarks) to an HTML file on external media, you can then import that HTML file into Internet Explorer in Windows 10 and from there import into Edge.

Delete Browsing History (Data) In Edge

You can quite easily delete browsing history (data) in Edge at any time. From the Settings menu and, under “Clear browsing data “, click the Choose what to clearbutton.  You’ll then be presented with a list of options. Checkmark those areas you wish to include for deletion and then click the Clear button.

Change Default Search Engine in Edge

The search engine in Edge is set to Bing by default (surprise!) but it’s very easy to change. Each time you visit a search engine page, Edge records it and adds the search engine to a list of options. For example; if you want to make Google your default search engine, simply visit the Google search page and it will automatically be added to your list of alternatives.

After that, access the Settings menu, scroll down and click on the View advanced settings button.  Look down the list of advanced settings and locate “Search in the address bar with”. Open the associated drop down menu and click <Add New>.  This will open a list of search engine pages you’ve visited along with options to manage them.