Is Microsoft Edge Worth Switching To? What Professional Services Businesses Should Know
Your browser is probably the most-used piece of software in your business. If your team spends most of their day in cloud-based tools - document management, practice software, email, client portals - they are doing all of that through a browser. So which browser they use actually matters, not just as a personal preference, but as a business decision.
Microsoft Edge has been quietly gaining ground. It recently passed Firefox to become the third most-used desktop browser in the world, sitting just behind Chrome and Safari. For a browser that replaced the much-maligned Internet Explorer, that is a significant turnaround. The main reason for that shift was a rebuild in 2020 around the same underlying framework that powers Chrome. That change made Edge noticeably faster and opened it up to a much wider range of browser extensions - the small add-on tools that make browsers more useful for specific tasks.
For a busy professional services business, the features worth paying attention to are not the flashy ones. Edge has a built-in security layer that checks websites against a list of known phishing and malware sites before you land on them. It also monitors saved passwords and alerts you if any have appeared in a known data breach - a genuinely useful feature for any team storing login credentials in their browser. There are also tracking prevention settings that give you more control over how much of your browsing behaviour gets shared with third-party advertisers, which matters when you are handling client information.
Beyond security, Edge has a few practical features that are easy to overlook. Collections lets you group web pages together by topic rather than dumping everything into a growing bookmarks list that nobody can navigate after a month. If your team is researching something - comparing software options, pulling together reference material for a matter - being able to save and organise those pages properly saves real time. Web Capture lets anyone on the team take a screenshot of part of a page, annotate it, and move on without hunting for a separate tool. If you are also thinking about Windows 11 settings worth enabling across your machines, there are several that work well alongside a properly configured browser.
The practical question is not really whether Edge is better than Chrome in some absolute sense. It is whether your current browser setup is consistent across your team, whether it is configured with security in mind, and whether the people using it every day have the settings they need to work safely. Most small businesses have never had anyone look at this properly. Browsers get installed, defaults get accepted, and nobody revisits it. The same pattern tends to show up with new software that never gets set up properly - the tool is there, but the configuration work that would make it actually useful never happens.
If you want someone to look at how your team's browsers and online security are set up, ITstuffed works with professional services businesses across Canterbury on exactly this kind of thing. You can read more about how we approach cybersecurity for NZ businesses, or if you want a quick look at your overall IT setup, book a 15-minute IT Fit Check at itstuffed.co.nz/booking.