Microsoft Edge for Android is.. hey, stop laughing
Microsoft Edge for Android has been released, seriously you guys stop laughing or I swear I will turn this website off. Ok, hold on a second… let me catch my breath.
But seriously, Microsoft Edge has gone from being the number one tool on the planet to download Google Chrome to being a pretty fast web browser that syncs back to your Edge at home using a Microsoft login.
The browser does not appear to be compatible with many of my products, so you’ll evidently need a newer version of Android to run it.
As a browser, it browses and feels pretty peppy. Tab switching seems pretty fast. You can continue a browsing session on a linked PC, and best of all you’re defaulted to using BING… YAY BING. Yes, you can change it. Hamburger, settings, default search engine. There’s no way to add search engines other than the included Bing, Yahoo!, Google, Ask, or AOL.
So if you’re interested in a privacy centered search, well, too bad.
I don’t have much bad to say about it, it appears to work and fairly smoothly, but the reviews on the Play Store do. I’m not going to go through every item and test, but here’s a list of complaints I see so far
- No option to set home page
- No option to add third party search engine
- Deleting downloads in hub deletes actual files also
- Not all favorites sync up
- No ability to view passwords
- Tabs work or don’t by device
- No home button / home page
- No adware protection (popup overflows)
- Can’t specify where downloads go
- It’s Microsoft
- Blocks pasting of a password in a password field
- No ad blocking support
- 140MB storage used and unable to move to external storage
- No night mode
And a series of minor gripes that are probably to be expected when dealing with an entity the size of Microsoft.
Looks like a fairly good first offering, we’ll see how it works in the future. Right now it’s lacking some fundamental options I want that Chrome offers, and Edge is still just a rebranded Internet Explorer in my mind, so it’s not really for me.
Download: Google Play
