and then clicking one of the headings for the app groups (A, B, and so on).
You have very few customizing options for the Start menu — for example, you can’t drag entries onto the Most Used list in the top left, or drag items from the list on the left and turn them into tiles on the right. Tiles on the right can be resized to small (one-quarter the size of a medium tile), medium, wide (two single-size slots, as with the Store and Mail tiles in the screenshot), and large (twice the size of wide). You can click and drag, group and ungroup tiles on the right, and give groups custom names.
FIGURE 2-9: The Start menu, with the index that lets you jump to apps quickly.
Although it’s possible to manually remove all the tiles on the right (right-click each, Unpin from Start), the big area for tiles doesn’t shrink beyond one column.
In tablet mode, Start looks quite different, although many of the options are the same. See Figure 2-10.
I talk about personalizing the Start menu in Book 3, Chapter 2 and working with tablet mode in Book 3, Chapter 3.
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge (Figure 2-11) finally sheds the albatross that is Internet Explorer. Edge is a stripped-down, consciously standards-compliant, screamingly fast shell of a browser, ready to take on just about any website anywhere. Microsoft Edge may see Microsoft taking back the mindshare it’s been steadily losing on the browser front for the past decade or so. As of this writing, though, Google’s Chrome rules the roost.
FIGURE 2-10: The Start menu in tablet mode.
FIGURE 2-11: Microsoft Edge finally lets you cut the Internet Explorer cord.
Edge is a Windows 10 app (formerly Universal app, formerly Metro app) that runs inside its own window on the desktop, like every other WinRT API-based Universal Windows app. In contrast, Internet Explorer is an old-fashioned desktop app, and the difference is like a Tesla 3 versus a 1958 Edsel.
Adobe Flash Player is turned off by default for enhanced security; there’s a reading view as well, which helps on smaller screens. Click the OneNote icon in the upper right, and all the OneNote markup tools become available. And you can Print as PDF.
On the other hand, Microsoft Edge has a new version that is not yet built into Windows 10. This new version is based on the same rendering engine as Google Chrome and has support for Google Chrome-like extensions, which play in their own sandboxes, staying isolated. Instead of the spaghetti mess with IE add-ons, we finally have some Microsoft-sponsored order. You can download it and try it at www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge.
Microsoft Edge uses Cortana for voice assistance and search capabilities. I talk about Edge in Book 5, Chapter 1.
Search
Search used to be intertwined with Cortana, making it bloated and slow in the initial versions of Windows 10. Also, Search collected a lot of data about what people do on their Windows 10 PCs. As of the May 2020 update, Search has detached itself from Cortana and received many improvements. But as always with Microsoft, people had to hate it first before Microsoft listened and made it better.
You can use Search to start apps using only the keyboard (geeks love that). You also get fast access to Windows 10 settings, your documents, photos, and emails, and even websites. As you would expect, Windows 10 Search is integrated with Bing, not Google, and your web searches are used to make Bing better. As shown in Figure 2-12, Search is used also to provide you with news (getting the latest headlines about coronavirus was not something I loved) and ads (promoting the new Chrome-based version of Microsoft Edge and the like).
FIGURE 2-12: Search helps you find what you are looking for, but also displays ads and the latest news.
Leaving all these minor annoyances aside, I do like the new Search a lot. The indexing of files works better than ever, it eats up fewer system resources, and search results are returned faster than ever. And Search is well integrated with OneDrive, SharePoint, and Outlook, so finding your stuff in the cloud is easy, as long as you use a Microsoft, Work, or School account with Windows 10. Two other cool feats are that you can tell Windows 10 what folders to exclude from Search so that it doesn’t bother indexing them, and have it respect your power mode settings when using Windows 10 on a laptop or tablet. Goodbye Windows 10 Search draining my battery faster than it should!
Cortana
Although Apple partisans will give you a zillion reasons why Siri rules and Googlies swear the superiority of Google Assistant, Cortana partisans think Microsoft rules the AI roost, of course. Unlike Siri and Google Assistant, though, Cortana used to take over the Windows search function. As of the May 2020 update, that is no longer the case, and Cortana has a box of her own, isolated from the rest of the operating system. You can see her in Figure 2-13. She now behaves more like a chat app and can take both voice and text commands from you.
