Microsoft's new AI reads all your tabs: Edge's Copilot gets a powerful-and controversial-upgrade

Microsoft Edge is getting a massive AI update, allowing its Copilot assistant to access and analyse information across all your open tabs. The new feature promises to supercharge your productivity, but has sparked a debate over user privacy and control.

What can the new Copilot do?

Microsoft is rolling out a game-changing new feature for its Edge browser that will allow the Copilot AI assistant to gather information from all of your open tabs at once. In its announcement, Microsoft reveals that when you start a conversation, you can ask the chatbot to compare products you're looking at, summarise a dozen open articles into a few key points, or pull together research from multiple sources without you having to click back and forth. For example, a user planning a holiday could have several hotel websites open and simply ask Copilot to compare prices, amenities, and locations, receiving a synthesised answer in seconds. This ability to "reason across your open tabs" is designed to turn the browser into a much smarter workspace. The company adds that users will have control, letting them "select which experiences you want or leave off the ones you don't."

Big changes and retired features

As part of this major AI push, Microsoft is retiring its old "Copilot Mode," which had similar tab-reading abilities but also offered agentic features like booking reservations. Those capabilities have reportedly been folded into a separate tool called "Browse with Copilot". Another significant new addition is "Journeys," a feature which uses AI to automatically organise your browsing history into topics, providing summaries and suggesting what to do next. However, this update has been met with some early criticism. Tech commentators and users have voiced concerns that "Journeys" is replacing the traditional, user-controlled browser history, sometimes making it harder to find direct links to the original pages you visited.

More than just tabs

The cross-tab analysis is just the headline feature in a wave of AI tools coming to Edge. A new "Study and Learn" mode is set to turn any article into an interactive quiz or study session to help you retain information. In a move similar to features seen on platforms like NotebookLM, another new tool will be able to turn your open tabs into an AI-powered podcast, reading the content aloud for you. An AI writing assistant is also being introduced, which will pop up to help you compose text directly on any webpage you're using. To make all of this more personal, Copilot can be given permission to access your browsing history and even has a "long-term memory" to tailor its responses based on your previous conversations, as detailed in a report from The Verge.

The privacy debate heats up

This deeper integration of AI into the browser is part of a wider industry trend towards "context-aware" assistants that understand your activities to provide better help. However, granting an AI access to read everything across all open tabs naturally raises serious privacy questions. These tabs could contain sensitive information, from online banking portals to private messages. Microsoft has stated that many of these features require explicit user permission and that there will be "clear visual cues" when Copilot is active and viewing your screen, particularly on the mobile app. Users will also have settings within Edge to control whether Copilot can access browser content. Despite these measures, the potential for an AI to have such sweeping access to personal data remains a key concern for privacy advocates.

Is this the future of browsing?

The advancements in Edge Copilot reflect a larger shift in how we interact with the internet. The traditional method of typing keywords into a search bar and manually piecing together information is being challenged by these new conversational and "agentic" AI systems. Experts believe we are seeing the birth of the "AI browser," a new kind of software built around an AI core rather than having AI features bolted on. These next-generation browsers aim to reduce the mental effort for users by automating research, summarising dense content, and even completing tasks like filling out forms or making online purchases on their behalf.

This wave of updates is now rolling out for Edge on both desktop and mobile. It represents a fundamental change in how we might interact with the web, placing a powerful AI right at the very heart of the everyday browsing experience