The idea of turning on Copilot Mode is to get it involved in your tabs and research, to distill info from web pages and do basic tasks.
Fancy placement
Once you enable it in Edge, it shows up as an icon to the left of your address bar, and clicking it opens up a small copilot window.
From here you have access to the full ai model, but it likes to keep things in its own tab.
It’s supposed to anticipate what you might want to do next, but struggles out of the gate on something as simple as opening a web page from a search.
Doesn’t open web pages
I tried searching for a Gazpacho recipe, display it in a web page, and convert the measurements to metric.
The search itself went fine, but was displayed in the small copilot overlay instead of on a web page. It says it «can’t interact with the browser» or open new tabs.
The recipe, when clicked, also displayed in the narrow copilot window — and there was no way to interact with it.
Then I tried the conversion, but had no way of knowing if it got the correct recipe.
Finding the cheapest hotel in central Copenhagen this weekend went just fine, but it stopped short of being able to actually order — so it doesn’t really interact with web pages for you.
Same goes for Paddleboarding in Seattle, it can find you the cheapest option, but stops short of booking it for you.
Most features «coming soon»
Microsoft says «it will soon» help you in your tasks and organize your browsing, and the same goes for accessing your things such as credentials and browsing.
It should, also «soon,» find you a paddleboard rental, check the weather and «make the booking.» But that requires agentic capabilities not worked into the browser just yet.
This is why Microsoft rightly says that Copilot Mode is at «the beginning of our journey,» «will evolve over time» — and it is only available for free for «a limited time.»
The capabilities for now seem like it’s the same functionality you could previously access in a sidebar window, simply moved to address bar.
It should be available in all markets that support Copilot, and is available on macOS and Windows — and if you are on Edge, you can enable it here.
Other AI browsers might work better, like Brave or Perplexity, and then there’s the long rumored OpenAI browser — that should be fully agentic and is supposed to come at any time.
Read more: Microsoft’s introduction, writeups at The Verge and TechCrunch.