Working with Edge and Internet Explorer

- [Voiceover] When Microsoft released Windows 10, they introduced a brand new rebuilt web browser called Edge. So far whenever we've used the internet in this course we've been working with Edge. On a fresh installation of Windows, Edge is the default web browser and it will be pinned to the task bar. So let me click on that to launch the Edge web browser. So if you click on a link to a web site address in an email message or elsewhere, Edge is the web browser that will open up. If you don't have Edge pinned to your task bar it's very easy to pin it there and we saw that earlier in the course.

You could go to the start menu and then scroll through this list of all apps, find Microsoft Edge, right click on it, and pin it to the start or pin it to the task bar. Now I already have it pinned in both places, so we don't need to do that. So, Edge has a streamlined, compact interface. In many ways it's very similar to Internet Explorer, but it's completely rebuilt, designed to run faster than Internet Explorer, and it should be much easier for Microsoft to update it in the future to work with modern web technologies.

There are some differences in the interface and some other new features in Edge that cannot be found in Internet Explorer. And we'll be covering those as we go through this chapter. If you're used to using Internet Explorer, then I think you'll be able to transition over to Edge pretty easily, especially after watching the rest of this chapter. But if you simply must use Internet Explorer for some reason, it is still included in Windows, and I wanted to make sure you see that is an option that's open to you. You can go to the start menu, go to the list of all apps, and you will not see Internet Explorer listed here until you go all the way down to Windows accessories, click on that to open it up, and you'll see Internet Explorer is available here, so I can click on that and Internet Explorer will still run here in Windows 10.

So you can still access Internet Explorer 11, though it's unlikely that Microsoft will do any future updates to Internet Explorer. So over time it's a good idea to transition away from Internet Explorer anyway. And, of course, if you prefer to use a different web browser, like Chrome of Firefox, you can certainly install one of those. Later in this course we'll talk about how to install new applications, so if you do not already know how to install a different web browser, we'll see that process in that chapter. Now that you know your options for web browsers, we'll be dedicating the rest of this chapter to getting you comfortable with working in Edge.