If you use the Edge browser in Windows 10 as your default (presumably by ignoring prompts on any Google property, to install and default to Chrome) then you may be familiar with the default tab behaviour, which helpfully shows you most-visited sites and also displays some “news” content below.

This “My feed” section can be a neat way to get news items of interest without having to do anything but fire up a new browser tab when you were planning to do something else anyway. Maybe distracting, though, unless you’re careful, and as well as the news, there’s plenty of click-bait garbage in there that can do just that. Who couldn’t resist naming these forgotten 1990s movies, or those car badges you don’t see any more? Or wonder what it was that happened next that shocked everyone?

There isn’t a lot of fine-tuning that can be achieved with My feed, however; a fact that’s driving people nuts on feedback forums and on the sometimes preposterously-named “Answers” forum (“please clear your browser cache, reboot, stand on one leg and rub the top of your head – that should fix it”).

Some of the feedback, though, and particularly the responses to it on the Insiders-only Feedback Hub, can be quite amusing….

The main degree of customisation you can do is to tweak the settings for what you prefer – click on the gear icon in the top right (above the Top Sites section),  and choose whether you want to switch off the feed and just show Top sites or nothing. Some lanugages (not US English, oddly) allow you to choose what your favourite topics are, though deselecting some (and making the surrounding border disappear from the topic) doesn’t actually remove it from your feed – it just makes it a little less prevalent, and not quite immediately.

If you have US English set as your language, you will get a list of topics across the top of the feed to filter its contents, but in every other language it seems to be pre-sorted.

The gripes being exposed online about the feed tend to be around the nature of the news itself or in the tone and volume of the adverts (like, in the UK, do I really want Microsoft to push dodgy-sounding $30 TV antennae?).

The most annoying ads appear to be served up by Taboola and there doesn’t appear to be a way of blocking them – unless you know differently; then please write up what you did and share the info with me, whereupon kudos will be bestowed in great quantity – so if you don’t want to put up with intrustive click-bait, then your only current option is to basically switch off the feed and go somewhere else for your news (research shows many are using social media as their preferred way of hearing news, though the tide may be turning).

Maybe use a proper news web aggregator site, e.g. Bing news or this little-used one, both of which would let you filter and customise your news sources, or rely on a news app to provide you with even more control or detail (such as MSN News or Feedlab if you’re after getting your news up the RSS).

The challenge with any news feed is filtering out the fake news. Still, there’s still the odd bit of truth out there.

Now that the Windows 10 Creators Update is generally available, it’s worth looking at some specific new features that may delight users who are upgrading. The Edge browser has been given a bit of an overhaul, so that’s a good place to start.

Battery improvements – as mentioned in ToW 335,  Edge browser has been deliberately tuned to work better on battery-powered laptops or tablets, compared to other browsers. Well, following the Creators Update, a further test was run to stream videos until the identical laptops drained all their battery – with Edge outperforming Firefox & Chrome handsomely. YMMV but it’s worth looking at browsing with Edge if you want to get the best out of the time on your laptop.

Extension support – there are more and more extensions coming out for Edge, featuring translation, password management, tracking & ad blocking and more. See them here.

Tab handling has had some further tweaks, from the ability to set tabs aside for later (and be able to bring them back individually, or all at once), to the enhanced view showing tab previews. Did you know, also, that if you click on a tab and drag it off the window your browser is in,  it’ll create a new window with just that tab in it? Handy if you want to have the equivalent of a “boss view” with all your social guff in one window, and all your boring work stuff in another.

Security – there’s some underlying improvement to the way that Edge protects the user from nastiness (well, some of the nastiness) on the internet – see more about it, here.

There’s a summary of changes in Edge within Creators Update here. And there are more tips, here.

As has been discussed on previous ToWs, one of the notable features of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update has been the slew of improvements that have come to the default web browser, Microsoft Edge. Even Thurrott is talking about it, if anyone is prepared to pay to read.

The availability of extensions is surely one of the big news items. One of the most useful extensions (see the rest here, or in the store) is LastPass – an online website password manager, useful for a couple of things … keeping an off-machine archive of your usernames/passwords for websites (across multiple machines if you pay for a Premium subscription) and an easy way of entering the saved username & password (look for the ellipsys icon which the addin shows at the far side of password dialogs – click on that to select the saved usernames & passwords for that site; you could use this to manage multiple identities for the same site).

The LastPass addin – and corresponding web service – also lets you set up a random password when signing up for new websites; hopefully avoiding the same username/password problem that hurts when online forums or websites get compromised and usernames & passwords are leaked. And who has the time to generate and remember a unique username & password for every site?

One of the nice features of the Edge browser in Windows 10 is the built-in Reading List – the idea being that if you’re noodling about on the web and want to mark something as worth reading, but just not right now, then the Reading List is the place to do it.

When you’re looking at a page you want to come back to (but generally only once, so you probably don’t want to add it to your Favourites list), simply tap or click the star button on the Edge menu bar, and you can add the current site to your Reading List, which can be recalled at any time by opening the Hub (the 3-line icon to the right of the star), then the icon that looks like a stack of paper. The featured item at the top of the list is the last one you were actually reading, and the ones below are the previously saved stories.

There is/was, in fact, a Windows app that could do the same sort of thing from any source – called Windows Reading List. That’s still a viable way of catching stuff to read later, though if you use Edge as your browser, then the same kind of functionality is built it. You can migrate your old Reading List entries into Edge if you so desire (the tl;dr version; open everything in your Reading List, then add it to your Edge browser’s Reading List).

Improvements have flowed to the Edge browser since Windows 10 release, especially in  the November TH2 update, version 1511 (press WindowsKey+R then run winver to see what version you’re on – OS build 10586 was the November update, but Insiders may see version 1511 and build well into the 14xxxs now).

Syncing content across devices was provided, but disabled by default…

If you choose to enable Syncing, then you’ll see the Reading List on multiple machines (assuming you’re using the same Microsoft Account on them all), and even on your Windows 10 Mobile phone too.

So, you can add stuff to your list whilst on the hoof (tap the ellipsis … on the bottom to access the Reading list or the menu to add stuff to it), and when you’ve read on any device, you can just tap/hold or right-click to delete that item from the list and it’s gone from everywhere.