Microsoft Edge 87 has now been fully released. There’s a few options in this that Business and Enterprises should consider:
Shopping
Microsoft by default, are enabling a bunch of shopping options in Edge. As per the article above, there’ll be coupons that’ll pop up, detections when there might be the same item you’re looking at cheaper elsewhere, and tab page enhancements to add extra shopping info about items.
I can already hear some of you saying you don’t want this in your place of business, so to disable it you’ll need to find the ‘Shopping in Microsoft Edge Enabled‘ GPO, located under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Edge default settings (users can override) / Microsoft Edge:
If you’re missing this setting, make sure you update your ADMX files by downloading from here and updating your central repository.
It’s good that this is under both force disable, as well as disable but let a user turn it on if they want. It’s not good that it’s on by default.
Friendly URLs
If you’re on Edge, you may have noticed this already. Copying a URL link from Edge, then pasting it somewhere that supports HTML code results in this:
instead of this:
https://www.adamfowlerit.com/
It’s another ‘on by default’ and although I can see certain use cases where this would be preferable, I’m fairly against changing the default copy/paste behavior that has been in place for decades.
If you copy a link and want to paste it as the link itself, you can use Ctrl + Shift + V instead of Ctrl + V … except right now, this doesn’t work in Office apps like Outlook or Word, and I’ve tested in both 2016 and 365.
Edge itself also has a new right click menu for pasting showing the options, but right click > mouse to menu, mouse to submenu, choose ‘Plain text’ is a bit clunky.
You can turn this off in the Edge settings, but again businesses and enterprises may not want this new feature in place, since some would more frequently be copying a link because they want the link itself, rather than a nice way to share it.
Again, Group Policy has a setting for this but this time it’s just a forced setting, rather than user changeable. If you want that, you’d need to deploy the registry setting as per the above article with a ‘apply once and don’t reapply’ option ticked.
The GPO is under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Edge > Configure the default paste format of URLs copied from Microsoft Edge, and determine if additional formats will be available to users
That’s a doozy of a name, and a doozy of a long dropdown menu with a ‘coming soon’ dropdown – none of these dropdowns actually match the description given.
I am a big fan of Edge, but it’s pretty obvious that the normal care that goes into updates just hasn’t happened in this instance. There’s already a fair bit of noise about this change, so who knows, maybe they’ll at least change the default behavior and not have it on?
My Feed
This one actually sounds really useful and lets both users and admins modify and present different sets of data arounds news and the organisation.
It has to be enabled in the Microsoft 365 admin center, which it was already on for me:
But, I’m missing some of the options selected in my Australian tenant. I checked my U.S. tenant and I see different things:
I’m not actually seeing the My Feed in my Australian tenant’s accounts, so I’d be guessing it’s either a US only thing at this stage, or it’s still rolling out. A bit annoying that this isn’t mentioned in the ‘My Feed‘ article or the original article mentioning the features that are now out, so hopefully the rest of us get it soon!
For the US tenant account though, it’s all there!
