If you haven’t pinned specific sites to the row of icons below the search box (see tip #2 above), you can make Edge’s default icons go away: Click the gear icon on the upper right of the page, and a “Page settings” panel pops up. In the “Quick links & search” section, click the dropdown next to “Quick links” and select Off. That gets rid of the icons for web sites just beneath the search box.

If you have pinned your own preferred sites there, you’ll want to leave quick links enabled, but you can turn the “Show sponsored links” toggle to Off to get rid of ads.

To get rid of the news articles that overwhelm the page, go to the “Show content” area of the panel and move the “Show feed” toggle to Off. Or, if you want to really strip down the page, move the “Show content” toggle to Off. That kills pretty much everything on the page except the weather. If you don’t want to see that either, scroll down a bit more and move the “Weather” toggle to Off.

Going with the stripped-down new tab look in Edge.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

 You can also strip out the background graphic for the new tab page by turning off the “Background” toggle. I don’t recommend it, though, because when you do that, you’ll get a gray page with a big Microsoft logo dead center when you launch a new tab.

6. Launch Copilot-centered new tabs

If you’re a frequent Copilot user, you might want to take a different approach to the new tab page.

The Copilot you get in a side pane when you click the Copilot icon at the top right of Edge is a somewhat stripped-down version of Microsoft’s full-blown Copilot app. If you’re looking to use the full-fledged version, there’s a simple way to do it: Tell Edge to open Copilot every time you open a new tab.

To do it, click the three-dot icon to the left of the Copilot icon at the top right of Edge and navigate to Settings > Start, home, and new tab page. In the “New tab page” section, turn on the Copilot new tab page toggle. From then on, every time you open a new tab, you’ll launch a full Copilot screen that’s similar to the standalone Copilot app.

The Copilot new tab page puts Copilot chat front and center.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

You’ll see the usual Copilot prompt box front and center, and beneath that, several prompts Microsoft thinks you might want to use. (Note to Microsoft: I’ve never used one of those suggestions even once. I’d guess few other people have either.)

What’s really new here are the vertical icons running down the left side of the page. Here’s a brief rundown of what each one does:

  • Open sidebar: Widens the navigation bar and shows a list of your recent chats so you can revisit any of them.
  • New chat: Start a new chat with Copilot.
  • Library: Build a library of Copilot-created content such as images, reports, podcasts, documents, and more.
  • Tasks: Create a Copilot task that automates something you want done, such as sending you a weekly email about a company’s stock price.
  • Health: Open Copilot Health, a version of Copilot designed specifically for getting health information.
  • Shopping: Use Copilot as a shopping assistant.
  • Imagine: Create or edit an image using Copilot.
  • Experiments: Discover and use new Copilot features that Microsoft is testing but that may or may not be officially launched at some point.

Clicking the Copilot icon at the top of the list of vertical icons returns you to the main Copilot interface you get when you launch a new tab.

As you can see, many of these new Copilot functions are aimed at consumers and unlikely to be useful in a business setting. Still, if you frequently turn to Copilot for help, you might find the Copilot new tab page a good alternative to the standard new tab page.

And note that setting up the Copilot new tab page doesn’t prevent you from browsing or searching the web normally. Just enter the search term or website you want to visit in the address bar at the top of the screen.

7. Put tabs to sleep to conserve system resources and boost battery life

If you’re like most people, you keep multiple tabs open in Edge so you can easily switch among the sites, web apps, and information important to you. It’s a great time-saver.

But it can also be a big memory and processor hog, which can slow down both your browsing and your other computing tasks. It needn’t be that way, though. You can put inactive tabs to “sleep” until you need them, freeing up resources, which will make your PC speedier and make its battery last longer, even when you have multiple tabs open. Microsoft claims that putting inactive tabs to sleep reduces memory use by an average of 32% and CPU use by an average of 37%.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. In Edge, click the three-dot icon on the upper right of the screen and select Settings > System and Performance > Performance.
  2. In the “Memory” section, move the slider to On next to Automatically put tabs to sleep.
  3. To change the length of time it takes to put an inactive tab to sleep, below “Automatically put tabs to sleep” click the drop-down arrow and select a time. Your choice is anywhere from 30 seconds to 12 hours.

Putting tabs to sleep can significantly reduce CPU and memory use.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

To reawaken any tab that’s been put to sleep, simply click on it, and it will resume normal activity.

There’s a chance that some sites might not work properly after they’ve been put to sleep. If that happens to you, you can tell Edge never to put that site to sleep again. To do it, scroll up to the “General” area on the “System and performance / Performance” page of Settings. Click the Add site button next to the “Always keep these sites active” item and paste in the URL of any site you don’t want to sleep.

8. Reduce power use with ‘energy saver’

Browsers can be power hogs, especially if you have multiple tabs open and are playing videos or music in them. That can be a particular problem if you’re using a laptop that isn’t plugged into a power source.

In Edge, the “energy saver” setting reduces the amount of system resources the browser uses, which extends your PC’s battery life. If you enable energy saver, it becomes active when your laptop is unplugged. Microsoft claims energy saver can give you on average an extra 25 minutes of battery life. To use it:

  1. In Edge, click the three-dot icon on the upper right of the screen and select Settings > System and Performance > Performance.
  2. In the “Power” section, make sure the toggle next to “Enable energy saver” is turned on. When you do that, you see two options: “Balanced” and “Maximum savings.”
  3. Select Balanced if you want your laptop to go into a lower-power mode to save battery life when your laptop is unplugged or has a low battery. Select Maximum savings if you know you’re not going to be able to plug your laptop in for some time. Note that in this mode, your video quality may be affected.

There’s also a separate option to use energy saver even if your laptop is plugged in. Use this option if you want to consume less energy when you use your computer. Note that if you use it, you may experience slowdowns when browsing the web.

You can get an extra 25 minutes of battery life with the energy saver setting, Microsoft claims.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

9. View and mark up PDFs

With Edge, there’s no need to launch a separate application when you want to read or mark up a PDF; its built-in PDF app is quite good. With it, you can draw on and highlight sections of the PDF and erase the marks you made as well. So save yourself time and use Edge rather than third-party software.

You don’t need to do anything to read a PDF online. Simply click it, and by default it will launch in Edge’s reader. You’ll find the markup tools, including for drawing, highlighting, and erasing, in a toolbar towards the top of the screen. To open a PDF from your hard disk, when you’re in Edge, press Ctrl-O, then navigate to the PDF and click it.

Edge has a surprisingly useful PDF viewer with markup tools.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

If you prefer to use your own PDF reader, even for PDFs found online, you might be annoyed that every time you click a PDF, it opens in Edge’s PDF reader. You can change that, though, by changing your default PDF reader.

In Windows Settings, select Apps > Default Apps and in the search box at the top of the screen just below “Set a default for a file type or link type,” type in .pdf. After you do that, the listing “Microsoft Edge Microsoft Edge PDF document” appears. Click it, and a screen appears showing you all the applications on your PC that can read PDFs. Select the one you want to use instead of Edge.

10. Turn on Edge’s AI-powered ‘scareware’ blocker

The internet is filled with scammers using sophisticated attacks to steal your data or money. A common one is so-called “scareware,” in which when you visit a website, your PC is suddenly locked into full-screen mode filled with fake malware warnings that claim your computer has been infected and urge you to call a phony tech-support line or allow remote access to your device to supposedly fix the problem.

Once you do that, the scammers steal your data, get you to pay for phony solutions, or embed malware on your system.

To fight that, Edge includes an AI-powered scareware blocker that builds and constantly updates a machine-learning model that detects suspicious behavior and stops the scamware in its tracks.

Typically, the scamware detector is turned on, but there’s a possibility it’s been turned off at some point or was never turned on in the first place. For example, on PCs with only 2GB of RAM or fewer than 5 cores, it’s not turned on by default. Microsoft recommends enabling it on those machines. To do it, in Edge go to Settings >Privacy, search, and services > Security, and in the “Scareware blocker” setting, turn the slider from off to on.

When you do that, make sure that “Block sites detected as scams” and “Share detected scam sites with Microsoft Defender SmartScreen” are turned on as well.

Turn on Edge’s scareware blocker to protect yourself from scams and data theft.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

11. Use Edge’s one-click form filler

How many hours a week do you spend mindlessly filling out web forms — your office or home address, shipping address, email address, and phone number? Wouldn’t it be nice to get that time back?

With autofill, built into Edge, you can. To use it, in Edge go to Settings > Passwords and autofill > Addresses and more. Turn on the toggle next to “Save and autofill addresses.” You can also choose to have Copilot analyze web forms and decide which bits of your information belong in which part of the form.

Microsoft autofill saves information that can be used to fill out forms online.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

From now on, whenever you visit a web form, just click in a text box, and your information will appear in a popup. Select it and the form will fill in. You can go back to Passwords and autofill to change any information you want.

12. Save time with keyboard shortcuts

There’s a good chance you use keyboard shortcuts for some of your office applications, like Word and Excel — and you likely use some for Windows itself.

But when it comes to browsers, many people forgo the keyboard except when absolutely necessary. That’s too bad, because keyboard shortcuts are a big timesaver. So to improve your productivity, check out these keyboard shortcuts for Edge in Windows. (Mac users can generally substitute the Cmd key for Ctrl and the Opt key for Alt.)

For even more shortcuts, see Microsoft’s complete list of keyboard shortcuts for Edge.

Useful keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Edge

Key combinationTaskCtrl-Shift-BShow or hide the favorites barCtrl-DAdd the current site to favoritesAlt-D or Ctrl-LSelect the URL in the Address barCtrl-E or Ctrl-KOpen a search in the Address barCtrl-FFind on the current pageCtrl-RReload the current pageCtrl-HOpen your HistoryCtrl-MMute or unmute volume on the current tabCtrl-NOpen a new windowCtrl-Shift-NOpen a new InPrivate windowAlt-F4 or Ctrl-Shift-WClose the current windowCtrl-TOpen a new tab and switch to itCtrl-WClose the current tabCtrl-TabSwitch to the next tabCtrl-Shift-TabSwitch to the previous tabCtrl-+ (plus symbol)Zoom inCtrl– (hyphen)Zoom outCtrl-PPrint the current pageCtrl-Shift-.Open the Copilot pane

This article was originally published in March 2021 and most recently updated in July 2026.