Welcome to Win 10: meet Edge and Cortana.

• Author: Gray, Bruce
• Position: Tech Talk

Windows 10 went into general release this fall- and, no, you aren't missing anything, There was no Windows 9. With the release of Windows 10 comes two new tools from Microsoft: Edge and Cortana.

Edge is the long-awaited replacement for Internet Explorer, whose demands and overhead had driven all but the most devoted advocate to exasperation and to other tools. Edge attempts to bring a social media component to the web browser. Upon opening, one is greeted with a full screen of news stories from various sources, much like you might find on the Windows 8 News tile. You're then invited to let Edge know where you want to go next. It seems Edge has embraced the desire to have access to the latest information, has taken the best of some of the competing web browsers and attempted to incorporate them into its toolkit. I think this is a good sign.

Cyberspace is full of people who demand high levels of data and Microsoft has seen the trend and looked to its competitors to see what they have done to address the trend. My experience so far shows Edge to be more responsive, faster and similarly user friendly than Internet Explorer. Edge also learns from your history. On a new tab, frequently visited sites will show up as tiles for quick navigation. These can be accessed via mouse, or even better by using a touch screen. The question remains about the level of acceptance of the "news feed" component. Will it be perceived as a nice feature or an added distraction?

A long-anticipated enhancement is security. Internet Explorer was highly targeted by those wishing to wreak havoc on your computing space. Part of the problem leading to that was the use of various extensions, such as like ActiveX and VBS Script, along with a variety of other browser "helpers." Edge simply doesn't allow these extensions to operate in its space. This will prevent some programs from operating in the Edge environment, but Microsoft says an extension feature, which will maintain a more secure environment, has an anticipated release date of 2016.

PC Magazine tested the performance of Edge against the most popular browsers and it did, in fact, perform extremely well. My experience mimics the analytical tests. Chrome is widely considered the king of speed in the browser world, and PC Magazine's tests show Edge beating Chrome in speed performance.

A new twist is that Edge provides a tool that allows for highlighting and annotating text on websites. You also can share your highlights...