Microsoft Edge may not have a Favorites bar after a future update. The browser may instead feature a collection of bookmarks instead. The change would bring Edge more in line with Chrome, which could help people transitioning from Google's browser to Microsoft's.
The change appears now in the Canary version of Microsoft Edge, which suggests it will make its way to the stable version of the browser at some point in the future. Leo Varela, who tracks changes to Edge and Chrome, spotted the change and highlighted it on X.
Varela also noted that the switch could be made to make Edge appear more like Chrome.
Microsoft might rename "Favorites" to "Bookmarks" in Edge. I suppose this aims to make the browser feel more familiar to users switching from Chrome to Edge. This change is already being tested in Canary: https://t.co/DmBSVj4IQPOctober 15, 2026
I'm curious if people are even aware that Edge has Favorites rather than bookmarks. Even if you click the star icon in Edge to add a site as a favorite and then place that site in the Favorites bar, the user interface looks almost identical to bookmarks in Chrome or other Chromium browsers.
Edge still has a poor reputation
This week I was speaking with a friend about Microsoft Edge and was somewhat surprised to hear them say it was a bad browser. I was actually more surprised that they had an opinion of the browser at all.
If you hop into our comment section or into subreddits full of tech enthusiasts, you'll often see people say something to the effect of "Edge is a fine browser; it's basically Chrome with a Microsoft paintjob."
But in my experience, that opinion is not held by non-techy users. In the rare instances that browser preferences come up in my everyday conversations, most people I speak with still connect Edge to Internet Explorer or just assume Edge is worse than Chrome.
I know Chrome gets a lot of hate around these parts, but the reality is that it's the world's most-used browser. Statcounter shows Chrome at a 66.36% market share right now. That tramples second-place Safari, which sits at 18.27%. Edge is in third place with a 6.04% market share.
That picture changes when exclusively looking at mobile devices. Chrome is even more dominant and Edge has essentially no mobile market share.
With Chrome being the de-facto standard for browsing, it's wise to make Edge look similar to Chrome. Microsoft needs to differentiate Edge in some ways, but Favorites versus Bookmarks is not one of them.
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