Having finally adopted the Chromium engine, Microsoft has made quite the impact with its browser, Edge. Access and compatibility with the Chrome extension store, great battery life and support for flags has made it a pretty solid competitor to Chrome.
In this article, we’re going over the top 15 Edge flags you should be using.
Before we dive into flags you should be using, let’s take a look at how you can use them in the first place.
How to use flags on Edge?
All you have to do is type in edge://flags in the address bar and hit enter.
You’ll now reach the Flags page. From here on, you can search for specific flags and enable them using the drop-down. Then restart your browser and the flags will take effect.
Also read: Chrome vs Edge vs Firefox: Which browser should you pick?
Force Dark Mode for Web Contents
One of the best flags you should be using is Edge’s enforced dark mode. While you can set the browser’s theme to dark, enabling this flag will force webpages and other web content to render in a dark theme as well.
The earlier issue with this flag that caused inverted colours in images has been fixed as well.
Tab Groups
If you keep working with a bunch of tabs all the time, this one’s really helpful for you.
This flag will allow you to visually group similar tabs together which makes it incredibly easy to find the tab(s) you’re searching.
Desktop PWAs Run on OS Login
If you use Progressive Web Applications or PWAs a lot, enabling this flag will let you run these apps on startup, making them behave like native apps with background notification support as well.
This flag totally removes all dependency that these PWAs have on the browser and helps you use these applications separately.
Also read: What is Cache Partitioning? Does it hamper your privacy?
Global Media Control
This one’s a lifesaver if you like listening to music as you browse the web. The flag makes media controls very accessible in Edge and even opens a picture-in-picture or PiP window for your reference.
You’re going to have to enable the following two flags to take full advantage of this feature.
- Global Media Controls
- Global Media Controls Picture-in-Picture
Compositor Threaded Scrollbar Scrolling
If you liked the scrolling effect on the classic Edge, you can’t it back on its Chromium sibling by enabling this flag.
Make sure to enable the Smooth Scrolling flag as well and you’ll find the scrolling working with the rubber band effect that it did in the legacy edition.
Heavy Ad Intervention
In a similar fashion to Chrome, Edge also has a built in flag to counter and optimise heavy ads.
Enable this flag Edge will automatically block out ads that are consuming way too many system resources.
Also read: How to get a detailed battery report on Windows 10?
Enable Sharing Page Via QR Code
The flag does exactly what it sounds like. It adds a button next to the address bar that shows a QR code which can be scanned to open the page.
It’s a really quick and easy way to share webpages with whoever you want.
Parallel Downloading
Enabling this flag can help you get better download speeds.
This flag essentially breaks your downloads into multiple parts and downloads them similarly hence, optimising downloads.
Sleeping tabs
When you leave your browser, or more specifically a particular tab idle, it continues to eat into your system resources. Enabling this flag will automatically put idle tabs to sleep, hence saving on system resources
This is a must have flag if you hoard a bunch of tabs.
Head over to edge://settings/system to edit the duration after which a tab is put to sleep.
Also read: How to insert em dash in Google Docs?
Quieter Notification Permission Prompts
If you have enabled notifications from a bunch of different sites, you know that they can be a real nuisance.
However, enabling this flag will block notifications inside of Edge giving you a significantly less intrusive browsing experience.
Tab Hover Cards
Another handy flag for tab hoarders, this enables a live preview of the tab as you hover over one. This makes navigating through tabs seamless and it becomes extremely easy to find out the tab you’re searching.
You’ll need to enable the following flags to take full advantage of this feature.
- Tab Hover Cards.
- Tab Hover Card Images.
Pull-to-refresh Gesture
Much like we refresh webpages on our smartphones, the pull-to-refresh gesture lets you refresh a webpage by swiping down with two fingers on the trackpad.
Note that some trackpads already support this feature so you might not even have to enable this particular flag. But in case your trackpad doesn’t, now you know what to do.
Also read: How to delete Google Photos account?
Enable Support For FTP URLs
If you often visit FTP URLs on your machine, this flag is going to come in real handy.
If you’re having any issues while trying to access FTP locations or URLs, enabling this flag will resolve the issue in no time.
Omnibox UI Max Autocomplete Matches
You must be well aquinted with the fact that Edge and practically every other browser shows autocomplete suggestions when you’re filling up a form.
Well if you’d like to see more suggestions at once in the Omnibox, this is the flag you’re going to need.
Enable Lazy Image Loading
As the name suggests, the flag loads images only when the user is in the active viewport. This can help save both system resources and internet bandwidth if in case you’re running low on the latter.
Even if you don’t have these challenges, having this flag open can make life easier for tab hoarders by saving on system resources you need when running a bunch of tabs,
Also read: How to import passwords from CSV in Google Chrome?
