Microsoft is testing a VPN-like service for its Edge browser, adding a new layer of security and privacy to the browsing experience. A recently-discovered support page on Microsoft’s website details the “Microsoft Edge Secure Network” feature, which provides data encryption and prevents online tracking, courtesy of Cloudflare.
While it isn’t available yet, even if you have the latest Dev channel build, the Microsoft Edge Secure Network feature appears to be similar in nature to Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 service. This is essentially a proxy or VPN service, which encrypts your browsing data so that it’s safe from prying eyes, including your ISP. It also keeps your location private, so you can use it to access geo-restricted websites, or content that’s blocked in your country.
João Carrasqueira
Good to see Microsoft continuing to invest in new features for their browser. The idea of integrating a VPN into the browser is not exactly novel, as Opera and Mozilla offer something similar, but it’s good to expand the reach of secure browsing services to more users. In its current, pre-release state, Microsoft Edge Secure Network looks fairly limited, as you need to sign in with a Microsoft account and the traffic is capped at 1 gigabyte a month. It would be a great idea to turn this on by default in InPrivate mode, as it would offer an extra layer of protection. Perhaps at launch Microsoft will offer a paid tier as well with unlimited traffic for a monthly fee.
Over the past year, since I last wrote about new features in Edge, there were a couple of small things added to the browser. The context menu added two new entries for selecting and copying web content, ‘Web select’ and ‘Web capture’. Web capture is basically an implementation of screen snipping inside the browser. I don’t find it particularly useful, as I can snip just as easily with the built-in Windows version. The only benefit of the Edge version is that it can capture an entire web page, scrolling past the area visible on screen.
Web select might sound underwhelming, as it simply selects a block of text, generally an entire HTML element, but I found it surprisingly handy. A lot of sites have convoluted HTML structures or scripts interfering with normal text selection, and in my experience Web select usually circumvents these issues. It also makes it easier to select blocks of text when using a trackpad, as Web select automatically expands a small text selection to include the surrounding paragraph or heading.
The Dev version of the browser is also home to a couple of experiments, which I find less useful and more self-serving for Microsoft. There’s a new awkward button that opens a side panel for Favorites and a Reading List. At first I got a bit excited about the return of reading lists in Edge, but the feature is extremely bare-bones (and overlaps heavily with already well-developed Collections): you can manually add sites to the list, but you have to also manually mark them as read – ideally when you would open links from the reading list, sites would load directly in Edge’s reading mode and the link would be automatically marked as read as you finish. I later discovered that this panel is simply a bug, a left-over of a Chrome feature that will likely never make it to Edge’s stable channel.
The Dev channel sports a left sidebar as well, a collection of buttons and features mostly dedicated to Microsoft services, from Bing search to Office, Outlook and games. This is verging on bloat in my opinion; anyone who uses these services regularly can bookmark them or find them on the New Tab page. The only button with some value is ‘Tools’, which includes a mini calculator, a unit converter and an Internet Speed test widget; the first two are included in Windows, so I don’t see much value in bringing them to the browser as well, except perhaps for people using Edge on other platforms. Fortunately, the sidebar can be easily hidden from the browser user interface.
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