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OpenAI says it has reduced the price of two GPT-5.6 models, cutting Luna's API price by 80% and Terra's by 20% as it works to make its models more efficient. [...]

A Chinese-speaking threat actor is suspected to be behind a fresh wave of cyber attacks targeting government organizations mainly located in Central Asia, including Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and the Syrian Arab Republic, since January 2025. These targeted organizations operate across several sectors, such as healthcare, research, government offices, Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Google has used AI tools to detect and patch 1,072 vulnerabilities in versions 149 and 150 of its Chrome browser, the company announced in a blog post.

That’s more vulnerabilities patched than in the previous 23 updates combined, according to Bleeping Computer.

One vulnerability detected by AI had been present in Chrome for 13 years but, for some reason, had never been detected by Google’s developers.

To further strengthen security, Google now plans to release new security patches for Chrome every week; down the road, it might even release two updates per week if needed.

A Chinese-speaking threat actor is using the DeepSeek AI model and the open-source Hermes Agent to conduct autonomous cyberattacks on exposed servers with limited human involvement. [...]

Apple’s outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, bade an emotional farewell to analysts and shareholders on Thursday as the company announced a record June quarter. His successor, John Ternus, takes over at the beginning of September with the company seemingly in solid shape.

The results were impressive, though some worrying challenges were confirmed. Apple managed to set a new June quarter record, but acknowledged slowing services growth and an unexpected mishap in forecasting future demand. Mac sales jumped an absolutely astonishing 28.7%, as the MacBook Neo grabbed consumer imagination, and overall the company saw growth everywhere except the iPad.

Apple’s fiscal Q3 2026 results saw the company generate $109.4 billion in revenue, up 16% year-over-year for a net quarterly profit of $29.8 billion. Gross margin for the quarter was 50.1%, compared to 46.5% in the year-ago quarter (though two points of this was attributed to tariff returns). 

More specifically:

• iPhone sales were up 21.7%, an unusually high number for what is traditionally a slower quarter.
• Wearables increased 6.5%.
• Services revenue increased 12%.
• And the iPad declined 5.9%.

The Mac is out the bottle

Apple’s huge Mac quarter is a bellwether moment for the company. The platform is benefiting from both the iPhone halo and the MacBook Neo/MacBook Pro blessing. Apple confirmed MacBook Neo is drawing interest from education and enterprise clients, with Apple CFO Kevan Parekh noting that roughly half of the large US education Mac purchases during the quarter displaced Windows and Chromebook devices. 

Big business wins included a massive 20,000-unit iPhone deployment at Morgan Stanley as the company shifted from employee-owned to corporate-owned/managed devices. The only problem is that demand for both Macs and iPhones is greater than Apple originally anticipated; as a result, some systems could be in short supply moving forward.

Memory, components, and demand

Cook described the current memory pricing environment as a “100-year flood” that forced Apple to raise prices on iPads and Macs. Parekh explained that memory cost changes explain more than 100% of the sequential gross margin decline, with adjusted gross margin falling from 49.3% in March to 48.1% in June (excluding tariff refunds). They’re projected to decline further. 

Cook noted the DRAM market has only three primary suppliers, and Apple is evaluating options for additional supply flexibility.

The company also has a fresh problem on its hands, in that its iPhones and Macs are selling in much bigger quantities than Apple expected. And while the company managed to meet demand in the quarter, it might be constrained in the next. “It’s not a regular supply issue. It’s a demand forecast issue, to be candid,” Cook explained. “The iPhone and the Mac are both doing remarkably better than we thought they would do.… We continue to expect high levels of demand. However, with less flexibility in supply chain, we expect the impact from the supply constraints to increase significantly sequentially.

“We’re seeing some very significant constraints currently with limited flexibility in the supply chain to remedy it.”

Services grew, right?

Apple’s services revenue also grew, but not as much as many analysts had anticipated. Apple passed $30 billion for the first time in a June quarter, buoyed by all-time records in cloud and payment services, while the company’s paid subscription base surpassed 1.5 billion. 

At the same time, Apple confirmed headwinds to services income, principally around currency exchange impacts and volatile economies, softness in mobile gaming, and – confirming the punitive impact of regulation on this part of the Apple business model – App Store business model changes.

What no one yet can know is the extent to which Apple’s recently announced Klarna product leasing deal will contribute both to services income and to accelerated replacement cycles. With 1.5 billion people in its addressable market, it’s very possible that a substantial number of customers will decide to pay for their Apple products on a monthly basis. The result would be a stable, predictable income stream for the company.

What about AI?

Apple’s introduction of Siri AI is delayed in the EU and China due to regulatory hurdles, though the situation in China could soon change following recent reports of an AI support deal with Alibaba and Baidu. 

Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Ng asked about Siri AI plans and experience. Cook said the company remains “off the charts excited” about Siri AI, and the company continues to receive positive feedback, though he added some warnings about cost. 

Cook explained that to handle users who might want to use Siri AI extensively, the company plans an upgrade option through iCloud+, though it is too early to define the specifics. (Incoming CEO John Ternus said Apple is focused on its own approach to artificial intelligence, but continues to see “enormous opportunity” in the sector.)

What the analysts said

Discussing the results, Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring pointed to decelerating services growth and memory costs nibbling at the edge of Apple’s margins. “Apple’s leverage over the supply chain appears to be in question,” he said, adding it’s not clear whether AI is serving as a measurable tailwind to products or services, with its future monetization impact still uncertain.

Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan noted that continued demand means supply constraints are the biggest inhibitor for the stock, since demand will be shunted into subsequent quarters. Wells Fargo also pointed to the longer range picture that despite supply challenges in the current quarter, Apple still has plenty of momentum going into Q1 2027.

Finally, Jeff Pu, of GF Securities, speculated that demand might also be impacted by an estimated $300 increase in the cost of the upcoming 18 Pro series of devices, though this may be partially mitigated by Apple’s new leasing deal.

Cook’s watch is almost over

This was Cook’s 19th and final earnings call as CEO, with his successor joining the call for the first time. Cook closed the meeting with this message: “As you know, this will be my final earnings call, and John will lead these calls going forward. The transition is going seamlessly, and I am beyond excited for John to step into his new role and lead Apple into its next era.”

Apple stock was down around 9% at mid-day Friday as investors consider the quarter’s record results.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, Mastodon and subscribe to The Core.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning of a significant increase in attacks targeting internet-exposed programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in the water and wastewater systems sector. [...]

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a previously undocumented Go-based loader framework called HollowFrame and a Rust-based malware family tracked as Matryoshka. According to Blackpoint Cyber, the intrusion sequence begins with a spear-phishing message containing a link to an encrypted archive, which holds a Windows Shortcut (LNK). Executing the file triggers a multi-stage chain that Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Walking around Dubai, it’s hard to believe a war is still going on in neighboring countries.

No missiles have struck the city, and it was clear during a recent visit that local residents are keeping to their routines. The biggest public worry, as it has been in many parts of the world, is the extreme heat. (The high today is around 106 degrees.)

Dubai, one of seven emirates in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), continues to emerge as a major global tech hub and is on the verge of becoming a major AI powerhouse. Each of the emirates has their own laws and traditions, with Dubai and Abu Dhabi — the UAE capitol — the most prominent.

Other nations recognize the region’s potential and Dubai’s position. The US, for instance, showed interest in currying favor with the UAE by sending a CIA spy to vet the emirate’s top AI firm, paving the way for future chip and AI deals. That outreach, highlighted in a report in The Wall Street Journal, was a hot topic in the local tech community.

These days, Dubai and Abu Dhabi hope to position themselves as hubs where people and companies go for AI. It’s location makes it an excellent place to do business with connections to Asia, Europe and Africa.

Broadly speaking, the UAE wants to be something of a Switzerland for AI, or “a neutral AI corridor between East and West,” Mahmood Abdulla, a regional technology expert, explained in a 2025 LinkedIn entry.

Data center buildouts

While states like New York are putting a moratorium on the construction of data centers in the US, the UAE is moving in the opposite direction; an aggressive AI data center buildout has government backing.

Stargate UAE, a data center project that involves top tech firms such as OpenAI and Oracle, is being built in Abu Dhabi. The city has essentially planned out a business model designed to turn AI into hard cash with a focus on the energy resources that will play a major role in the effort.

The plan is to redirect Abu Dhabi’s vast energy resources — it has up to 100 billion barrels of known oil reserves — to data centers generating AI tokens. Those tokens can then be sold as compute resources to produce revenue.

With oil markets volatile because of ongoing conflicts and the worldwide rise of renewables, pushing energy use to AI data centers might be a more reliable form of revenue long term.

Will it work? That remains to be seen. But unlike the US backlash against data centers construction in many place, a ban here seems unlikely.

The entrepreneurial spirit

Technological innovations from entrepreneurs have been at the core of Dubai’s rapid growth in recent years as a global business center. Here, AI is already quietly woven into daily life, much as it is in China, where AI is already in factories, homes, and infrastructure.

One founder told me that naming his company to include “AI” is more of a US thing. UAE companies focus less on boasting about AI models and superintelligence; they tend to emphasize user experiences.

On a separate track, Dubai is already targeting the launch later this year of robotic air taxis flying from the airport into the city. (That’s ahead of New York City, where electric air taxis are still being tested.)

Still, Dubai is behind the US when it comes to autonomous ground transport. The first autonomous taxis hit Dubai streets just last year, and there are a limited number operating in tourist areas.

A complicating face tor for the area remains the Iran war. Dubai’s Internet City, a hub with buildings belonging to the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, largely emptied when the war started in late February. Foreign tech workers left, and property prices declined.

But the real estate market is booming as opportunistic investors buy low. Their bet: the US-Iran war won’t stop the UAE’s growth.

Money is flowing into the area in other ways. Heavy tax burdens in Western countries are pushing wealthy founders to move businesses to Dubai’s tax-free environments. And Dubai is opening the door to those with digital nomad and freelance visas. Although visas can cost thousands of dollars a year, lower rent and healthcare costs compared to the US can offset those costs.

Rivals are emerging, too

UAE’s economic rival, Saudi Arabia is also rising as a tech powerhouse. Riyadh has undertaken reforms at a rapid pace to become an attractive place to do business under its Vision 2030 program.

Saudi Arabia requires corporations to have regional headquarters in the country to win government contracts, a policy that challenges Dubai’s status as a regional business hub.

The UAE also relies heavily on immigrants and human labor, which can be both a plus as well as a challenge. There is no pathway for entrepreneurs or long-time tech workers to retire here, which can undermine worker motivations to stay.

Still, the attractive business environment, combined with local infrastructure and a skilled labor force, make this area appealing. As one founder told me, if the US doesn’t want its most skilled immigrants, the UAE will be happy to welcome them with open arms.

As newspapers move online, the buildings that once housed their printing presses need new occupants.

The Minnesota Star Tribune has just sold its old printing plant on the edge of Minneapolis to the aptly named property developer Legacy Investing, which plans to create a new data center there. has found the ideal way to bring them back to life.

This is the second such move by Legacy. It has already bought a building in downtown Minneapolis that it has transformed into a data center for artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

These old buildings, already connected to power, are an attractive option for developers — especially with some grid operators threatening power cuts for new-build data centers during power shortages.

Legacy is taking a small-is-beautiful approach rather than replicating the massive data centers being built for Big Tech firms. Those are the size of small towns and consume huge volumes of water and hundreds of megawatts of power, while the capacity of Legacy’s downtown building is about 30 MW, and it expects the Star Tribune site to host around 20 MW of data center equipment.

The scaled-down approach may well be an attractive option for operators in the future.

This article first appeared on Network World.

It’s a sign of the times: Security conference DefCon has added smart glasses to its list of banned audio- or video-recording devices.

The organizers have said that, with no consistent way to understand whether smart glasses are recording or not, they have taken the step to ban them in their entirety on the grounds that they erode trust and invade people’s privacy.

Putting corrective lenses in the smart glasses will be no excuse: DefCon insists that visitors bring a pair of glasses without the smarts instead.

The smart glasses ban has been added to DefCon’s already strict rules on photography, which among other things ask visitors not to take group shots and to use “portrait” mode (or a low F-stop for those with old-fashioned cameras) to focus on the foreground, so that people in the background appear blurred.

The smart glasses market has gone up a notch lately. Google and Samsung have both announced Gemini powered eyewear running on Android. Apple is looking to launch its new generation of smart glasses next June, citing privacy concerns as the reason for the delay.

It is not only tech conferences that are getting jumpy about smart glasses. CISOs are beginning to get wary about their impact on organizations and whether their data is secure.

This article first appeared on CSO.

Every time you SSH into a server, run sudo, install a package, or start a container, Linux decides whether to trust it. Most of those decisions happen so quickly that administrators rarely think about them—until one turns out to be wrong. Looking more closely raises an interesting question: why do such different security problems often fail in similar ways?

Bitsight says some cheap Android TV boxes have shipped with apps that rewrite their hardware identity to mimic Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, or Vivo phones, then click ads on websites run by the same operators. Researchers named the operation Fuyao and attributed it to Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Co., Ltd., a mainland China company founded in 2019. The same apps have a second job. When a box Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Attackers are adapting established techniques to AI platforms, emerging technologies, and changing user behavior. ESET's new threat report examines the rise of malicious AI skills, AI-assisted malware, ClickFix attacks, record quishing activity, and ransomware tools designed to disable security software. [...]

Linux administrators automate almost everything. Backups run on a schedule, logs rotate on their own, updates ship through pipelines, and health checks happen without anyone opening a terminal.

Google on Thursday announced that it fixed a whopping 1,072 security bugs in Chrome versions 149 and 150, surpassing the total number of flaws the company fixed across the prior 23 milestones combined. Both versions were released last month. In its latest patch for Chrome 151, released Wednesday, the tech giant resolved 370 flaws, out of which 349 were reported by Google itself. Seven of the Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Your operating system forms the base layer of your production pipeline. Moving from a basic workstation layout to an enterprise environment takes deliberate work around security hardening, telemetry, and automated provisioning.

An academic study has disclosed a "widespread class" of security vulnerabilities impacting 4G and 5G core networks that, if successfully exploited, could trigger denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and even session hijacking, allowing an attacker to seize control of a user's network session. The findings have been released by a group of researchers from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Device code phishing - the abuse of the OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant to steal access tokens - has evolved from a niche red-team technique to an industrial-scale threat in under six months. Designed for input-constrained devices like smart TVs, printers, and so on, the device authorization login flow has been adopted by a wide range of apps and use-cases that it wasn't originally [email protected]

Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 says a Chinese-speaking threat actor used DeepSeek through the open-source Hermes Agent framework to launch attacks autonomously. After an initial Telegram instruction, the agent found internet-facing systems and selected public exploits. The researchers recovered no further operator input in the session. The operator, tracked through the aliases knaithe and KnYuan,Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

We live and work in browsers. It’s where we spend most of our time — and it’s where we waste most of our time as well. Web browsing is slow, inefficient, and full of time-sapping annoyances.

But it needn’t be that way. You can turn your browser into a lean, mean productivity machine. To do it, just follow these tips for Microsoft Edge in Windows 10 or 11. You’ll learn how to switch between home and work profiles, put idle tabs to sleep to speed up your PC, tap into the power of Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant, and more.

(Note that these tips are written for the most recently updated version of Edge in Windows 11 25H2 and Windows 10 22H2. Things may be slightly different if you use a different Windows version, and not all of these features are available for Edge on macOS or other platforms.)

So let’s get started — time’s a-wasting, and so is your productivity.

1. Switch between work and personal profiles

With remote and hybrid work models now common, many people use the same device for work and personal use. When it comes to using a web browser, that can quickly become problematic.

Mixing work and personal favorites makes it far more difficult to quickly get to important work websites or personal websites. When you’re working, you don’t want to wade through hundreds of links to family photos, vacation destinations, and YouTube videos of cats befriending parrots when you’re just looking for the OSHA website about mine safety regulations. And when you’re off working hours and want to watch a video of a Persian cat nuzzling a cockatiel, a website detailing the GDPs of every country in Europe and Asia is not your primary destination.

Different profiles let you completely segregate your browser use. That doesn’t just mean different favorites. It also means different Collections, different extensions, different passwords, and more.

Each Edge profile is tied to a different Microsoft account. So to use different profiles, you’ll need to create different Microsoft accounts. To create a new Microsoft account in Windows 10 or 11:

1. Go to https://account.microsoft.com. If you’re signed in to your account, click your profile icon or initials in the upper-right corner and select Sign out. Close Edge, restart it, and go back to https://account.microsoft.com/.
2. Scroll down to the button that says Create an account, click it, and follow the prompts to create a new account.
3. On the page that appears, click the Sign in button in the middle of the page. On the screen that appears, select the Create one! link, then follow the prompts to create a new account.

You’ve now got two different Microsoft accounts you can use for Edge. When you log into one of those accounts in Windows, that will be the default account that Edge will use when you browse the web.

To switch between the two accounts, you’ll need to add that second account to Edge. To do it:

1. Click the user profile icon at the top right of Edge. On the small pane that appears, select Set up a new profile, then select either Personal or Work or School. 
2. You’ll be sent to a web page in a new instance of Edge. Click the Sign in button at the far right, then select Sign in to sync data.
3. On the screens that appear, sign in and confirm that you want to proceed.

Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to log out of your current account and then log into the second account to use it in Edge. Instead, when you want to use the second account, click the user profile icon at the top right of the Edge window. A small pane appears with your current profile at the top. To switch to your other profile, select it in the “Other profiles” section.

To minimize distractions, set up work and personal profiles in Edge.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

You’ll now be sent straight to that profile. When you do that, Edge will open in a new window. So you’ll have both your profiles running simultaneously, each with its own tabs, in two separate windows. (Note that you can set up multiple additional profiles.)

You can also tell Edge which profile to use when you visit certain websites. To do it:

1. Click the user profile icon in Edge and select Profile settings. (Alternatively, you can click the three-dot icon next to the user profile icon and select Settings > Profiles.)
2. In the “Profile settings” area, click Profile preferences.
3. At the bottom of the “Automatic profile switching” section on the page that appears, click Add site next to “Custom site switch.”
4. On the “Add site” popup, enter a website URL and select the profile you want to switch to for that site.

Should you decide you want to remove a profile, go to Settings > Profiles and scroll to the “More profiles” section. Click the trash can button next to any profile you want to delete. You can always add it again later using the steps above.

2. Get to your most-used sites quickly

Bookmarking and organizing favorites is a great way to manage a large collection of websites, but it’s not that useful if you simply want to get to a frequently used site quickly. Edge has some tricks up its sleeve if you want to get your most-used sites pronto.

Add a site to the new tab page

When you open a new tab in Edge, a page appears that shows you news and other items you might be interested in. It’s easy to pin a site to this page so it’s accessible whenever you open a new tab.

Look toward the top of the page, just underneath the search box. If you don’t see icons for pinned pages (such as for Yahoo, Amazon, your inbox, and so on), click the settings icon on the upper right of the page (it looks like a gear) and turn “Quick links” on.

A row of site icons appears, along with a + icon. Click the + icon and type or paste in the name and URL of the site you want to pin, then click Add. The site will now appear along with the other pinned pages.

Pinning a site keeps it handy on the new tab page.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

You can rename or remove any site pinned to the new tab page by clicking the three-dot icon next to the site icon and selecting Rename or Remove from the menu that appears.

The new tab page is tied to your current profile, so you can set up different pinned sites on the new tab page for each of your profiles.

Pin tabs to the top of Edge

For even faster access to frequently used sites, you can pin them as browser tabs so they appear at the far left of all your other tabs in Edge. When you’re on the site you want to pin as a tab in Edge, right-click its tab and select Pin tab from the menu that appears. The pinned tab will now appear to the left of all your open tabs.

The icon for the pinned tab looks smaller than all of your other tabs, and it will persist even after you shut down and restart Edge. If you have multiple pinned tabs, all of them will appear to the left of any non-pinned tabs.

Like pinned sites on new tab page, your pinned tabs are unique to each Edge profile; they won’t carry over from profile to profile.

Pin sites you often visit to the Windows taskbar

For Windows users, the fastest way to access a frequently used site is to pin it to the Windows taskbar. That means it’s always visible (even when Edge isn’t running), and you can launch it with a single click.

When you’re on the site you want to pin, select the three-dot icon at the top right of the browser window and select More tools > Pin to taskbar. A small screen appears with a text box in it with the name of the site. Use the name provided or type a new name into the text box and click Pin.

3. Create tab groups for more efficient browsing

If you’re like lots of people, you frequently browse with many tabs open, and find yourself wasting time switching to the tab you want because of all of the clutter.

There’s a simple fix: group tabs into categories so you can quickly switch to the tab group that has the tab you want. For example, you might group them into “News,” “Museums,” “Finance,” and so on. Or you could create a tab group for research related to a specific project.

To do it, right-click a tab, select Add tab to new group, and then name the tab group. You can then drag other tabs into the group. You can also assign each tab group a unique color so they’re easy to differentiate at a glance.

Creating tab groups makes it easier to find the tab you want quickly.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

If you’ve already created a group, when you right-click a tab, you’ll see “Add tab to group” rather than “Add tab to new group.” When you click the arrow next to it, you’ll see a list of all your existing groups, so you can easily add it to any of them. You’ll also see “New group,” which will let you create and customize a new group.

Once you’ve created a tab group, you can rename it, change its assigned color, add new tabs to it, ungroup the tabs from it, delete the group and all the tabs in it, and more. Just right-click the name of any group and select an option from the menu that appears.

4. Enlist a Copilot as you browse

Microsoft’s genAI chatbot, Copilot, has become increasingly integrated with Edge, so much so that Microsoft now calls Edge an “AI browser.” At the moment, that’s more hype than fact, but it is true that Edge gets new Copilot features added on a regular basis.

Edge provides a couple of ways to interact with Copilot, one of which is to open the Copilot sidebar to the right of the main browser window. (We’ll go over the other method later in the story.) Click the Copilot icon at the top right of Edge, and the Copilot pane appears. Here’s where you type in prompts for Copilot.

There’s a tremendous amount you can do with Copilot, most of which is beyond the scope of this article. To learn more about what it can do and how to use it, see our story “9 ways to use Copilot right.”

However, here’s one use designed specifically for web browsing: summarizing the contents of the page you’re currently visiting. Depending on the structure and content of the page, Copilot can give a high-level overview of the entire page, provide capsule descriptions of individual articles or sections, and more. You can also ask Copilot to extract specific information from a page, such as all the AI-related information on it, and organize the information into a bulleted digest.

To do all that, open a web page and open the Copilot sidebar. You’ll see a few suggested prompts, one of which should be related to summarizing the page, such as Summarize the main points on this page or Create a summary of this page. Click the prompt, or if you don’t see it, type it into the text box at the bottom of the Copilot pane.

Use Copilot to summarize the content on a web page.

Preston Gralla / Foundry

You can also ask it to summarize the last page you’ve visited. Click the down arrows towards the bottom of the Copilot pane, and you’ll see a listing for the previous page you’ve visited, such as Computerworld.com. Click the text summarize my recent activity on [page] and it will do that for you. Again, if you don’t see that text, type it into the Copilot text box.

The summarization feature, though, still has rough edges, or at least it did when I was writing this article. If you leave the web page you’re currently on and go to a new one, the summary of the old page remains, and there isn’t an immediate way to summarize the new one. To get a summary of the new page, you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the Copilot pane, click the arrow (it will be facing either up or down, depending on whether you’ve previously clicked it) and click “Create a summary of this page.”

In that section, you can also click listings of your other open tabs and get summaries of any of them.

5. Remove clutter when you launch new tabs

When you create a new tab, the initial page is filled with pinned sites, suggested news stories, widgets, and more. If you find that page distracting, you can change it to a much cleaner, more stripped-down page.

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.