Microsoft’s latest Edge updates are doubling down on AI, and the most controversial change is the new Journeys feature. Instead of letting you manually search your browsing history, Edge now uses Copilot to summarize your past sites—often without providing direct links. Critics argue this makes browsing less productive and more confusing. Here are six essential things you need to know about this shift.
1. What Is Journeys?
Journeys is a new Edge feature that replaces the traditional browser history with AI-powered summaries. When you revisit a topic you previously researched, Edge’s new tab page may automatically generate a Copilot prompt—for example, “Summarize the most beginner-friendly projects across these pages”—and display an AI-written digest of those sites. The key difference? No clickable links are included. Microsoft positions Journeys as a way to help you “pick up where you left off,” but the lack of direct access to the original sources can leave you struggling to find the specific page you wanted.
2. How It Differs from Chrome’s History Search
Google Chrome lets you search your browsing history by keyword, showing a list of pages you visited. That’s a compromise: you still see the actual URLs and can click through. Edge’s Journeys goes a step further by outsourcing the entire process to Copilot. Instead of seeing a timeline or search results, you get an AI-generated summary with no links. While summarization can be helpful for quick overviews, it removes the control you had over finding the exact site. For many users, this feels like a downgrade in transparency and efficiency.
3. The Quiet Death of Collections
Back in 2019, Microsoft introduced Collections, a feature that let you group and store tabs in a sidebar for later use. It was a practical, user-driven way to organize research. But in January 2025, Microsoft announced it would kill Collections later this year—even though it’s still present in the current browser. Journeys is the AI replacement, and it works very differently: it automatically groups sites by topic based on your history, but again, without offering direct links. The loss of Collections means users lose a manual organizational tool in favor of an automated, sometimes opaque, AI process.
4. The Missing-Link Problem
The biggest complaint about Journeys is that its AI summaries include no hyperlinks to the original pages. When you want to revisit a specific article or product page, you’re forced to search again manually. This breaks the natural flow of browsing and can be extremely frustrating. As one critic noted, “Now I have to stop, search, and try to find what I was looking for previously. How horribly unproductive.” In an era where AI is supposed to save time, Journeys often wastes it by obscuring the path back to the information you need.
5. Privacy and Permission Concerns
Microsoft’s language around Journeys is a bit murky. The feature doesn’t appear to be opt-in—it’s enabled by default. However, the company does state that it can use your browsing history to “deliver more relevant, higher-quality answers with your permission.” This raises questions about how much control you really have. Even if you trust Microsoft with your data, the fact that your history is now being fed into Copilot for summarization—without you explicitly activating it—makes some users uneasy. Privacy advocates recommend checking the Edge settings to see if you can disable this feature.
6. The Bigger Picture: AI Replacing Human Judgment
Journeys is just one example of a broader trend: AI quietly taking over tasks that humans used to manage. Instead of letting you scan your own history, Edge decides what’s relevant and summarizes it for you. While this can be convenient for broad research topics, it removes the nuance of your original browsing choices. You might have visited a site for a specific reason, but the AI might lump it into a generic group. The result is a browser that thinks for you—but often misses the mark. As Edge continues to prioritize Copilot, users may need to decide whether this trade-off is worth the convenience.
In conclusion, Edge’s Journeys feature represents a significant shift in how we interact with our browsing history. While the promise of AI-assisted recall sounds appealing, the current implementation—especially the lack of links and the loss of manual tools like Collections—leaves much to be desired. Before you rely on it, consider testing it yourself and adjusting your privacy settings. The future of browsing may be AI-powered, but it doesn’t have to be at the expense of your productivity and control.