Forum Discussion
MicrosoftImprovements to history in Microsoft Edge
Microsoft
Thank you so much! That's great to hear and I'll be super excited once 90 hits stable in a few weeks. Definitely a positive improvement for those with decades of muscle memory on how History usually works.
I do sympathize with users who like the original edge://history tab (which has great features like natural date filtering like "Yesterday" and "Last Week"). If there's an easy way to open that tab, I can see where they're coming from.
I also hope the redraw / performance can be improved. It's currently a not-particularly smooth five-step animation (on an i7-1065G7 / 20H2 / 88.0.705.81), with optional steps for users who do not pin the History tab:
- (optional) Insert the History icon in the toolbar menu.
- Load an empty white floating box.
- (optional) Move the empty white floating box to the left with the icon.
- Load the top chrome with search and the three-button menu.
- Load the dark scroll bar.
- Load the history items (biggest delay here).
For #5, perhaps this data (at least the recent items) could be cached? Unfortunately, the same delay occurs with edge://history as a tab, but it feels less bloated because it's a tab (which we associate with websites that often load progressively) versus an in-tab browser menu that we expect to populate all items immediately.
The most noticeable seems to be #5, but I'm also confused why #3 and #4 didn't load with #2 automatically. Shouldn't they load instantly? Likewise, removing a history item via the floating "X" has another 300ms to 800ms delay (also occurs in edge://history).
A labeled diagram (post-load, it's harder to annotate a video):
I agree the loading delay is a real shame. I recommend everyone in this thread to have a look at this 10 year old browser extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recent-history/fbmkfdfomhhlonpbnpiibloacemdhjjm
It does basically the same thing as the new Edge history flyout, but it opens instantly while using almost no memory for the caching I assume it does. You can even type to search lol.Of course, the edge flyout can display all history, not just a few recent entries like the extension I compared it to does. But isn't caching the first couple items of an "infinite scrolling" type list a really old trick too? I think the Edge flyout even does that alredy, when you scroll really fast to the bottom you hit a limit and have to wait again for more entries to load.
The Edge flyout looks much nicer but if I have to wait like four seconds everytime I want to use it, then I'd rather use the less sleek-looking work of some random extension guy who 10 years ago did what dozens of MS devs apparently struggle with today.
