I’m used to just dragging the address off the address bar to create Web shortcuts on my Desktop. But Edge won’t let me in Windows 10. Help! How do I create new Web page shortcuts in Windows??
The change from Microsoft Internet Explorer to Microsoft Edge has generally been a really good thing. Not many people were sad when MSIE ended up as simply a part of computer history after years of it being problematic for so, so many Web site designers and online companies. Just about everything’s better in MS Edge with Windows 10 – particularly the latest release! – and there’s not much reason to look back at all. Except, as it happens, with Web shortcuts.
For reasons I cannot explain, Microsoft decided that people didn’t actually use Shortcuts and just axed that functionality right out of the Edge application. What’s odd is that it’s based on Google Chrome (well, Chromium) and Chrome for Windows does include drag-to-make-shortcut functionality. But sure enough. Microsoft Edge no longer lets you drag and drop to create shortcuts.
In fact, if you try, you just get a red ‘no’ symbol for your efforts that vanishes once you release the mouse button:
To create Web shortcuts now, you can either use a different Web browser or you can use the Shortcut creation tool built into Windows 10. Since it’s likely you’ve never done the latter, let’s do just that. It’s easy.
Simply right click anywhere on your Desktop and choose New > Shortcut:
That pops up a window with a skeleton of a Web shortcut. You’ll have to do the work of specifying the associated URL, but that’s okay. You’ll start out with this:
Now pop over to Edge and copy the page Web address from the address bar. Once it’s in the copy/paste buffer, click back to the Create Shortcut window and simply paste in the URL (Control-V or Edit > Paste):
For this demo, I’m using the MSN soccer news page https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/soccer
Once you’ve typed in or pasted in the Web page address, click on Next to get to the shortcut naming screen:
You can see I’m giving my own Web page shortcut the mnemonic name of MSN Soccer. A click on Finish and I have a new icon on my Windows Desktop:
But while we’re at it, let’s change that icon. You can’t pick an arbitrary picture but there are a lot of built-in icons from which to choose (most of which are kind of old school office images). Right click on the new Shortcut and you’ll get this:
No big surprise; click or tap on Change Icon… and you can pick from the gallery of images shown. I’ll pick a star since there’s no soccer ball. The results are lookin’ good:
And that’s how it’s done. Now a simple click or tap and the MSN Soccer News page pops right up in Microsoft Edge:
So it’s a bit more tedious than just dragging and dropping onto the Desktop, but since you probably aren’t creating shortcuts a dozen times each day, it’s definitely doable and being able to customize the icon is just a nice little bonus. Now about the latest soccer news…
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Windows forever. Please check out my massive Windows help pages area for lots of useful tutorials while you’re here!
I was addicted to chrome but when I got my new desktop I wanted to try the new and exciting Edge! Looks like this unavailable small feature is going to drive me back to chrome. I love opening my google homepage and having all my shortcuts listed right there. I just don’t understand what Microsoft was thinking. For such a big company run by very SMART people this should be a no brainer. sigh…
You can indeed do just that, Dotolive! When you are looking at your Microsoft Edge blank screen, click on the gear icon and choose a different layout. It should show a row of icons that are your most frequently visited sites.
Hi!I am going back to chrome for same reason
I do not know if things have changed but this does not work now in October 2020
The shortcut is abnormal for one thing, as a normal shortcut is just a container for the target file and can have any name you want to give it, but here the internet address is treated as being a .url file, and the shortcut carries the name of the file and can’t be changed.
On operating the shortcut, Edge opens with a relevant page but not the actual website. I was trying to create a shortcut to BBC i-Player, and all I get is the following as page content –
[InternetShortcut]
URL=file:///C:/Users/Me/Desktop/I-Player.url
This doesn’t work. I can create a nice-looking desktop icon with the little “shortcut” arrow in the lower left corner, but clicking it does exactly nothing.
I give up. Instead I went into the “. . .” menu (words are too difficult?) and clicked “Pin this page to the Taskbar” and will use that instead. I’m wondering why Microsoft, with its thousands of employees, can’t figure out how to put an option right below it that says (and does): “Pin a shortcut to this page to the Desktop.”
A rhetorical gripe for sure, but it’s still hard to believe that in September of calendar year 2020 Microsoft is writing software that’s a significant step down from 98SE. (For the record: I’m only using Orwell 10 and Edge because it’s a work loaner and I have to.)
An alternative way to create the shortcut is to install Chrome. You can then drag the lock symbol to the left of the URL onto your desktop. Since Chrome creates a web document shortcut, clicking it will load the page into your default browser which can still be Edge.
With EDGE, there are settings options to pin the page to the task bar or start menu. Unfortunately, there is no way to get EDGE to open a new window when clicking the pinned page. And it that page is already in the open EDGE window, nothing happens. The positive thing here is that the WebPage ICON is included.
In my Chrome example, the resulting shortcut doesn’t include the page ICON. To set the page ICON, I’ve found I can use Chrome developer tools to find the ICON in the of the page and load/save that to my hard drive. If it is an ICON file, it can then be referenced directly by the “Change Icon” button. Otherwise, it needs to be converted. (I used https://convertio.co/).
That is “a” solution, but if someone asks me about an app, I try to figure things out in that app for them, not point them to something else. 🙂
How can I open the shortcut as an application in a new window, like Chrome does?
Seems no one knows… A post I read awhile back said it’s not possible with Edge.