Microsoft Edge may let you disable its non-essential parts — and you’ll love the reason why

Unfortunately, this isn’t a widely accessible option. It’s available to those who are part of the Canary Channel as part of a tuned feature rollout. Personally, I’m not a fan of Edge and wish they’d make it easier to just delete it from my Windows laptop. As I’ve mentioned many times before, when you choose to use another browser, Microsoft makes it tedious to make the switch — and requires you to take extra steps to do so.

How do you see if you can use this new feature

head to settingsHe chooses Optional features, and see if disabling optional components is readily available. You can also try the edge://settings/OptionalFeatures link.

The funny thing is that the optional feature added to Edge dates back to Windows 10, which gave users the ability to quickly disable optional features. You usually end up with better performance for your system.

Microsoft acknowledges this by saying, “Edge now lets you turn off optional browser features to make it a faster browsing experience for you. The features you turned off are still available to you but require a small download to enable them.”

Again, adding this to Edge is smart on Microsoft’s part, but they should also reintroduce the ability to choose another browser as the default with one click as it was when using Windows 10.

Other users have been complaining for a while now about the default browser issue and resenting the built-in games and newsfeed full of fake news. Edge, which is supposed to be “sophisticated”, has become bloated and its own worst enemy. As such, I wish we could simply delete it. Microsoft should leave browsers to Google, Apple, and other tech giants. Instead, you should focus on making the upcoming Windows 12 less of a killer and battery killer, but that’s a different story for another day.