Forum Discussion
MicrosoftIntroducing the new downloads experience
The new Microsoft Edge recently turned one year old, over the last year we’ve heard your feedback about the downloads experience. While there’s a lot you liked, a common criticism was that it was often hard to notice new downloads in the tray at the bottom of the window. Closing the tray to clear up screen real estate also prevented you from monitoring your download progress, and it was difficult to get back to your downloads later. Today, we’re thrilled to introduce a major update to downloads which should address all of this feedback and more.
When you start a download, a new menu will now appear in the top-right corner with all your active downloads in one place. This menu is easily dismissible so you can continue browsing uninterrupted. Best of all, you can monitor your overall download progress right from the toolbar thanks to the new progress ring on the downloads button.
Simply click on the downloads button at any time to view all your downloads again. You can hover over or right-click on files in the list to pause, restart, or cancel a download. You can also select See more to view and manage your past downloads as well. And as with the recently updated experiences for favorites, history, and as of today Collections, you can even pin () the downloads menu open so you can monitor your downloads in detail while you browse.
The downloads button will remain in the toolbar until all the downloads have finished, at which point the progress ring will change into a green checkmark. Simply open the menu to see your finished downloads and hide the downloads button again.
If you haven’t downloaded a file recently, you can still access the new downloads menu from the Settings and More menu (). And in response to overwhelming feedback, you can finally choose to always show the downloads button on the toolbar for one-click access even when you aren't in the process of downloading a file.
For those of you who prefer a more immersive view of your downloads, you can easily get back to the downloads page by selecting Manage downloads in the downloads menu () or typing edge://downloads in the address bar.
We’re so excited to hear what you think of the new downloads experience, which is currently available in the Canary and Dev channels. Please send us your thoughts by submitting feedback in-app and in the comments below.
— William Devereux, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Edge
115 Replies
William Devereux I DO LOVE THIS NEW DOWNLOADS EXPERIENCE!
But, sometimes I need to scroll up 1 or 2 lines to see a new download progress bar.
William Devereux for those of us who need to download several files per day, documents, images, etc, it's a nuisance as it covers the page. Very bad UX.
Offer an option to get rid of the flyout.... and use the old unobstructive bottom bar.HotCakeXThat option doesn't revert you back to the downloads bar, but instead means no download is shown at all. There needs to be an option to disable the new menu completely and revert back to the bar which provided a much more intuitive experience.
Pretty nice feature, but can you please improve it for touch users, meaning that the options for each downloaded file (like redo, open folder and delete) are displayed by default, so that you don't have to hoover or tap it to see them.
I already deleted two entries by mistake because I tapped on the wrong empty space where the delete symbol is hidden.
Thanks 🙂
William Devereux This is probably one of my favorite new features EVER (besides vertical tabs:)). Thank you so much, Microsoft Edge team!
This is probably one of the best developments of this browser so far.
Usability of this new menu is really good and all the optional buttons to manipulate the downloaded file are great.
Top job!
Love to see it! This is an improved version from Firefox; I really like that "Open Folder" is a prominent option. I always need to do some file management with downloads, so I rarely ever open directly.
Haven't received it yet since I'm on stable but I love this feature! I absolutely hated Chrome's way of displaying it at the bottom and can't believe they still have it displayed there. I don't use Chrome anymore but instead Firefox for the past many years, so I'm used to having downloads at the top and I am glad you added it at the top. I'd like to move to Edge in the near future.
William Devereux Is it possible to go back to the old experience? With this new experience I cannot drag files into applications for easy upload.
ttsoldier wrote:William Devereux Is it possible to go back to the old experience? With this new experience I cannot drag files into applications for easy upload.
Why not add drag and drop to the new flyout instead of going back to the old design?
I love the new design and the way I see it, adding drag and drop feature will solve your problem.
This new download feature used to work for me but it has now changed back to the old method and I cannot see a way to change this. I am running the latest Dev build. Is there a setting I need to change?
ElectroRich wrote:This new download feature used to work for me but it has now changed back to the old method and I cannot see a way to change this. I am running the latest Dev build. Is there a setting I need to change?
It's currently controlled feature rollout, not available to everyone and not available to all regions.
just wait it out or if you really want it,
add this to the end of the target of your Edge shortcut:
--enable-features=msDownloadsHub
William DevereuxI really like this new manager, but I've noticed that you can pinch to zoom with the trackpad or touch in these new UI elements (such as Downloads, Collections, Favourites, and History) which looks very unnatural and doesn't feel right. Hopefully the ability to zoom within these new parts of the UI can be disabled?
- I hadn't yet noticed that one could pinch zoom in the flyouts. That's solved the issue I would have posted about whereby the text of the speed, amount out of how much etc while a download is ongoing is too small for me to be able to read it. So my vote is NOT to remove the zoom functionality. Have an option to turn it on or off by all means.
