While Microsoft’s new and improved Edge web browser, which is now based on the open-source Chromium engine (the same used by Chrome), does a lot of things right, it still tries to force you to use the company’s unloved Bing search engine - but that could soon be changing.
At the moment Bing is the default search engine when you type search terms in the address bar of Chrome, as well as when you open a new tab. While you can change the address bar’s search engine to something else like Google, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, you’re currently unable to change the search engine displayed when you open a new tab.
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However, that appears to be changing, as a new Edge Canary update (which is an early version of Edge released to people who want to help test out new features) looks set to come with new options for changing the search engine used in new tab windows.
About time
As Windows Latest reports, users of the new Edge Canary update can now change the 'Search on new tabs' setting from 'Search box', which uses Bing, to the Address bar, which will hide the Bing search box and let you quickly search from the address bar of Edge using whatever alternative search engine you’ve selected.
You can also now set a custom web page to show when you open a new tab, so you could set it to Google’s home page, for example.
To change these settings, you can type in Edge://settings/search in the address bar.
With these new settings appearing in Edge Canary, it’s expected that they will make their way to the proper version of Edge soon.
This is a welcome move by Microsoft, as although it tries to force Bing on Windows 10 users as often as possible, its search engine simply isn’t as popular as Google, which means many people will be glad to change the search engine in Edge to one they use more regularly.
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