Customizing Microsoft Edge on Your iPad and Mac

Setup is refreshingly quick. On the iPad you grab Edge from the App Store, open it, and either sign in with a Microsoft account or tap skip and browse as a guest. On the Mac you download the installer from Microsoft, drag the app into your Applications folder, and you are off. The whole thing took us under five minutes on each device.

The one step we strongly recommend is signing in with the same account on both. That is what unlocks the syncing that makes Edge genuinely useful across an iPad and a Mac. Once we did that, our favorites, saved passwords, and open tabs followed us from one screen to the other without any fiddling. If you would rather keep things local, you can decline sync during setup and still use every browsing feature, you just lose the handoff between devices.

One tip from our testing: set Edge as your default browser only after you have used it for a day or two. On both iPadOS and macOS the default-browser switch lives in system Settings rather than inside Edge, and it is easy to flip back if you change your mind.

A handful of things kept us coming back, and they are worth knowing about before you decide. These are the parts we used daily rather than the long marketing list:

• Tab and history sync. Closing the lid on the MacBook and picking the same tab up on the iPad a minute later never got old. This is Edge at its best.
• Collections. A clip-and-save panel where you can drag pages, images, and notes into named groups. We used it to plan a trip and it beat a pile of loose bookmarks.
• Vertical tabs on the Mac. When we had twenty tabs open, stacking them down the side instead of cramming them along the top made everything readable again.
• The built-in reader view. It strips ads and clutter from articles, and on the iPad it made long reads feel calm.
• Profile separation. Keeping a work profile and a personal profile apart, each with its own favorites and history, kept our two worlds from bleeding together.

None of these are unique to Edge on their own, but having them bundled and synced across both Apple devices is what made the combination click for us.

This is where Edge rewards a little patience. On the Mac, open Settings and then Appearance, and you can change the overall theme, pick an accent color, decide whether the toolbar shows labels, and choose what the new-tab page looks like. We turned off the news feed on the new-tab page almost immediately, which made startup feel far less noisy.

On the iPad the options are slimmer but the important ones are there. You can switch between light and dark, move the address bar to the bottom so it sits closer to your thumb, and tidy up which buttons appear on the toolbar. Moving the address bar down was a small change that made one-handed browsing on the iPad much more comfortable, and it is the first thing we now set on any new install.

Extensions are the bigger story on the Mac. Edge runs both its own add-ons and most Chrome extensions, so the password managers and ad blockers we already relied on dropped straight in. On the iPad there is no extension support, which is a real gap if you lean on those tools.

A few habits made Edge noticeably nicer to live with. First, take two minutes to prune the new-tab page on both devices. The default layout buries useful shortcuts under suggested content, and clearing it out gives you a clean starting point every time.

Second, lean on Collections instead of bookmarks for anything you are actively working on. Bookmarks are great for sites you visit forever, but for a short-lived project, like comparing apps or researching a purchase, a Collection keeps everything in one tidy place and syncs to your other device.

Third, if you read a lot of long articles, learn the keyboard shortcut for reader view on the Mac and the toolbar icon for it on the iPad. We saved real time once it became muscle memory. And finally, set up your work and personal profiles early. Doing it on day one saved us from untangling mixed-up history later.

Edge is not flawless, and a few things genuinely annoyed us. The biggest is that the iPad version cannot run extensions at all. If your browsing depends on a specific ad blocker or password tool, the iPad app will feel stripped down next to the Mac.

The new-tab page also pushes Microsoft news and shopping suggestions by default, and while you can switch most of it off, having to do that on a fresh install feels pushy. On older iPads we noticed Edge using a bit more memory than Safari, which led to the occasional tab reload when we had a lot open. Battery life was also slightly shorter than Safari in our side-by-side use on the iPad, which makes sense given Safari is tuned for Apple silicon.

Finally, some features that get top billing are tied to a Microsoft account and a stable connection. If you browse mostly offline or prefer not to sign in, you are using a thinner version of the browser than the reviews suggest.

If the downsides above are deal-breakers, you have solid options. Safari is the obvious one. It is faster and lighter on iPad battery, it ties neatly into iCloud and Handoff across your Apple devices, and it needs no setup. The trade-off is fewer customization knobs and a smaller extension catalog on iPad.

Chrome is the closest match to Edge in feel and shares the same extension ecosystem on the Mac, so people deep in Google services often prefer it. Firefox is worth a look if privacy controls matter most to you, with strong tracking protection out of the box. For a deeper rundown of browsers and other handy tools we rate, our guide to the best utilities apps for iPad is a good next stop, and you can browse everything in this space on the utilities hub. If you are stocking up a new device, our take on free versus paid budget apps and our notes on getting the most from the Verizon app pair well with a fresh browser setup.