Safari isn’t the best iPad browser, and I’m surprised by the solution I found

The state of web browsing on the iPad has remained pretty stagnant over the years. Despite all the aesthetic and functional changes that came with the “series 26” refresh across the software portfolio, the underlying experience has remained more or less the same. That predominantly has to do with the fact that Apple wants every browser maker to use the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari on the iPad. 

In a nutshell, developers have little to no control over modifying or controlling the WebKit engine, which means the best that they can do is make their browsers look slightly different, but not really offer any meaningful next-gen features or performance optimizations. It’s been nearly 20 months since Apple technically allowed developers in the EU block (and soon, in Japan, too) to try alternative engines.

Unfortunately, the restrictions on using third-party web browser engines have meant that no serious alternatives have popped up in nearly two years. Interestingly, Microsoft has played to its own ecosystem benefits and baked a few features at the heart of Edge that meaningfully set the experience apart from using Safari on an iPad. I’ve been pushing Edge on my 13-inch iPad Pro for over two weeks, and the experience has been pretty rewarding.

The mighty side panel 

The biggest feature addition in Edge is the Copilot side panel. When you tap on the Copilot button in the upper right corner, it opens the Edge side panel alongside the right edge of the screen. If your work involves using an AI chatbot (such as ChatGPT or Gemini) or plenty of Google Search across different tabs, this side panel is nothing short of a superpower for users. 

Now, this is not the full-fledged Copilot experience that you would get in the standalone app, or by opening its dedicated web view in a different tab. But on the positive side, you get all the core controls that set the whole web browsing experience apart. The most notable perk is the AI agent itself. 

For background research, quick information look-up, or double-checking facts, the Copilot side panel saves you the hassle of opening a new tab, searching for the desired information, and reading it all up on a dedicated website(s). 

By default, it is set to the Quick Response mode for getting answers to all your queries at a much faster pace. For queries that require more research or reasoning, there’s a Smart mode that seeks all your answers from OpenAI’s latest GPT-5 model. 

And finally, we have Think Deeper. This one is tailor-made for scenarios where you need to perform complex research that requires plenty of back-and-forth between sources of information, such as academic research papers, physics problems, and more. 

The Copilot side panel in Edge also lets you generate images, and turn text-based material (such as a PDF report) into an interactive podcast. This feature first made waves when Google introduced it in NotebookLM, and it has since expanded to other products where Gemini is now a part of the package. 

The real gem is file analysis, which lets you analyze a long report or image, and have Copilot AI take appropriate action. For example, you can upload a long quarterly finance report or scientific research paper, and ask Copilot to list the key takeaways as bullet points, the core drawbacks as a paragraph, or simply extract specific nuggets of information from it.

My favorite is Deep Research. This is an agentic feature that is now available across all major AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, among others. Essentially, you specify a certain kind of sources for the AI to look at, on a specific topic, and it will perform comprehensive research to create a detailed report. It’s pretty compute-intensive and takes more time, but accomplishes a chore that would otherwise take you a healthy few hours with manual internet search and data compilation. 

Getting all that done, without ever opening another tab, or a dedicated app, is an underrated gem. As a journalist who spends a lot of time pushing the iPad Pro as a full-fledged computing machine, the Copilot side panel in Edge is one of the most powerful tools at my disposal for web-based tasks. 

Collections 

For any person whose regular study process or workflow is web-based, they know the pain of organizing information. You can only go so far with bookmarks. The only option left is using a third-party tool such as Notion or good ‘ol Apple Notes. But you can’t avoid the drudgery of a repeated copy-paste job. 

Of course, switching back and forth between Safari and the app of your choice is an inherent part of the whole experience. Edge solves that problem in a rather clever fashion, thanks to a feature called Collections. With a single click, you can add any active web page to a Collection, or create a new one. 

Each item you add to a collection, even if it’s a URL, it’s saved as its own card with a rich preview that includes the page headline, as well, for easy identification. The best part is that Collections are synced across all platforms where you use Edge, as long as you are signed in with the same Microsoft account. 

That’s a huge sigh of relief for more reasons than one. You see, whatever content you save with Safari, it locks within the Apple ecosystem. That means content saved within Safari on an iPad will only be accessible if you have an iPhone or Mac, with the same Apple account logged in. 

Edge is available across every major mobile and computing platform, which means your Microsoft account is all you need to access all the saved material across different collections.

Most importantly, this applies to every piece of web-based content you save within Edge, from favorites to passwords. And oh, did I mention that you can add personal notes to each card that appears in your custom collections? Yeah, that too! 

A few other perks

AirDrop has long remained one of the most desirable reasons behind investing in Apple’s hardware. But the walls are crumbling slowly. Since we are talking about a system for seamless file syncing, Edge on iPad offers a feature called Flow. It’s an instant cross-device drag-and-drop system for sharing files.

It has a chat-like interface and saves all the exchanged files to the OneDrive container linked to your Microsoft account. But unlike AirDrop, which is limited to Apple devices, Drop enables seamless file sharing across all devices on which Edge is installed — Apple or otherwise. 

Another underrated perk is native PDF viewing and annotation. Safari can open PDF files, but you need to save and open them in the new Preview app to make edits. With Edge on iPad, you just need to open the file in another tab to do all the annotation and get back to work. The reader mode in Edge is on par with Safari’s iteration, as well. 

Overall, despite being bound by the limitations of the WebKit engine, Edge offers a few meaningful perks that push it above the vanilla Safari experience on the iPad. And given the recent momentum that we have seen with Copilot making its way to core Microsoft products such as Windows 11 and the Office 365 suite, I am hopeful that Edge will gain more meaningful AI-driven experiences in the coming months, even with Apple’s restrictions in place.