Forum Discussion
MicrosoftIntroducing the new favorites experience in Microsoft Edge
Favorites are an integral part of any web browser, and in the months since we released the new version of Microsoft Edge we’ve heard a lot of feedback about the experience. Specifically:
- While the favorites menu provides quick access to your favorites, it isn’t always the easiest to use and more complex tasks typically require going to the edge://favorites page
- The favorites page works well for bulk management but isn’t ideal for more lightweight tasks like getting to, updating, or moving a single favorite
- Many of you also miss the Hub in the legacy version of Microsoft Edge—especially the ability to pin your favorites and other content open while you browse
Today, we’re excited to share that we’re evolving the favorites experience to address your feedback and provide a more efficient way for you to quickly access and manage your favorites without losing context of the page you’re on. These changes are currently available in the Canary and Dev channels.
The new favorites experience blends the power of the full page with the dropdown’s ease of access. Your favorites are now displayed in a classic tree view, and you can edit, organize, and even search your favorites in-line without having to go to the full page. The new favorites menu stays around while you need it and disappears when you’re done, making it easy to open or manage multiple favorites at once.
We’ve also brought the full breadth of management capabilities to the new favorites menu. In addition to the basics like reordering, renaming, and editing, you can now add new favorites and folders directly from the dropdown menu, sort, import or export your favorites, remove duplicate items, and much more. With the new favorites menu, these features are always at your fingertips.
Best of all, in response to overwhelming feedback you can now pin your favorites open in a pane along the side of the browser. This allows you to see your favorites while you browse and helps you stay more productive during those times where you need frequent access to your favorites.
For those of you who prefer a more immersive experience, we’ve got you covered. You can get back to the favorites page at any time by clicking on the favorites menu button () and selecting Manage favorites. Or simply type edge://favorites into your address bar.
We’d love to hear what you think of the new favorites experience, so please send us feedback! This is a new interaction model that we hope will save you time and keep you in the context of what you’re doing. In the coming months, you’ll see other content types adopt this model as well, including downloads, history, and more. Stay tuned!
— William Devereux, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Edge
99 Replies
Very nice, But will you please, please, PLEASE add the same ability to open a favorite with a middle-click and it leave the menu open for opening more favorites to the dropdown menus from the favorite bar as you now have in this new favourites' icon menu dropdown.
William Devereux PLEASE do not put multiple non-stop animations like these in pages, at most let them repeat once or twice. I don't know if there is a name for this condition I have but my eye cannot stay with the text while there is something else jigging about on screen (large swathes of the web is only accessible to me with an ad-blocker). Even the "immersive reader" shows the hateful things - it also does a good job of getting rid of them.
Super excited and great improvement.
The only issue is it is hard to select Favorites when we are on tablet devices , in legacy Microsoft Edge due to large icons, it would be easier to use with touch, but in tablet, because icons and distances are small , it is not easy to select them. It is also applicable for other menus too.
One interesting feature would be having icon like expand and click on it would open Favorites.
- William Devereux this is great!
William Devereux i hope we can open the clicked favorite in a new tab instead of current tab, current tab always in use . or at least give us option to control this
Whenever user clicks on the Pin icon to turn the favorites list into sidebar, this action needs to be remembered, so that the next time user clicks on the favorites button on Edge toolbar, they won't have to click on Pin icon again, instead the sidebar should open.
I have another suggestion.
Thanks for the new experience, which is a great improvement.
Two common complaints I see in the Answers forums are closely related:
- The vertical spacing between favourites is to big, and
- The text size is too small.
These two design elements are of course related, but the current solution seems to be the worst possible. It's understandable that spacing has to be adequate for touch users. However, there is a large group of bigger screen users who see a lot of 'wasted' space. on the machine I'm using now, there are 19 favourites listed in Edge while IE shows 30.
Would it be possible to make these two elements user-configurable to some degree?Noel Burgess Agree the space between favorites can be reduced. It would be great to have a bigger space for the folders.
Claudiox wrote:space between favorites can be reduced.
on the contrary I think the spacing between favorites and folders are just perfect. it's useful to have this amount of space, easier to use with mouse. they got it right, don't need to change this part of it.
the only thing is to make the Pin state remembered and also make the favorites menu faster to appear.
Noel Burgess wrote:
Would it be possible to make these two elements user-configurable to some degree?[Replying to myself]
Sorry! I now find that some combination of font customization options does in fact increase the size of the text in the favourites list. I'm not sure what triggers the change, but it may be as simple as opening a new window to see the results of increasing the text size in the Customize fonts control. Vertical spacing is probably still oversized for some users, but probably not for those who have difficulty reading the tiny text.
One little adjustment is needed when the font size is increased: the line-height seems to be hard-coded and thus too small, with the result that descenders are obscured on some characters. On my PC, setting line-height to normal corrects this with no change to vertical spacing.
Hello William Devereux
Thank you for bringing this resource and also for listening to everyone's feedback
That is what I like about Microsoft, you people hear customer's voice and take it seriously. Excited to use the new favourites features and what the Microsoft Edge team will come with new models in downloads, history and more menus.
Yes, TheShaunSaw you are
. Their goal is to improve their products to be more suitable for their customers.
