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
William Devereux Do you plan to fix the wildly inconsistent menus both in the titles of the menu items and in the order. Here are some differences
Favorite in New Favorites Menu & Sidebar
Favorite in Favorites Bar
Favorite in Manage Favorites (edge://favorites/)
Favorite in Old (86.0.622.43) Favorites Menu
As you can see, the current favorites bar menu matches the old favorites menu. With some small exceptions, I expect all of these to be the same,
There are also functional differences between the Copy/Copy link menu behavior, not the UI difference of name, but with what is placed on the clipboard.
Also note that the favorites bar menu still lists Ctrl+Shift+O as the hotkey for Manage Favorites. While this now brings up the new favorites menu, it definitely isn't the much more function manage favorites UI at edge://favorites/ which either no longer has a hotkey or has an undocumented one.
See Re: Announcing a new way to paste URLs, Link format! - Page 3 - Microsoft Tech Community for more on the clipboard functionality differences.
William Devereux Please support pinning the favorites panel on the left. For content that looks and feels like a table of contents or an index, I prefer it to be pinned on the left not the right. From my perspective, this is not unlike how the PDF viewer in Edge now exposes a table of contents, on the left, at least for LTR languages. I would use my favorites similarly.
While on the subject, I would prefer the same for the collections sidebar.
Curiously, the dev tools supports the option to pin to either side so it shouldn't be difficult to support this for other pinned content.
I would accept that collections and favorites may share a right or left side setting since these do not coexist. That too is puzzling since collections/favorites can coexists with a sidebar search and devtools with three simultaneously pinned panels. My screen isn't wide enough for this but it is curious that collections and favorites couldn't coexist with each other like that both do with the others.
William Devereux Pin Favourites is great to have them right where you need them, on the side of this very wide pages (16:9 screens all around us) just a couple of fixes:
- once I pin the favourites I would like them to stay pinned for next time I open them (ala collections)- the pinned favourites page should be width resizable.
Keep up the good work, great browser you are building
- Although I like it, it feels so slow to use. I hope MS improves on it.
Puh - I sorted my favourites Alphabetically - just to try it out - but how to sort them back by Date ?
Please help - I cant use them sorted Alphabetically !
Regards Martin
martinklein William Devereux Loosely related to your issue, I dragged a folder inside the Favorites menu, and it is now locked at the top of the menu. I can't put it back where it was. I do agree that there is value to being able to sort on different criteria.
- Which Edge channel/version?
William Devereux This is a huge improvement to favorites, thanks!
It would be great if the pinned state could be remembered. So, if I choose to pin the favorites to the side pane and then close the favorites pane, the next time I select favorites, they should open pinned in the side pane again. An unpin button would enable returning to the default dropdown menu behavior.
William Devereux That's great. And while you're working on favorites, I have a suggestion for the bookmarks-bar: enabling an "auto-hide" feature similarly to the taskbar. Thanks !
William Devereux Thank you, thank you, thank you!
The old favorites experience is what i missed most about the new Edge. I'm so happy you brought that experience back - I had essentially stopped using favorites completely due to the old chrome experience, now i already back in the flow - love it!!!
When there are many collections, single column favorites can not be satisfied. It is suggested that the display can be displayed automatically according to the screen height。
William Devereux Would it be possible to retain the classic menu style of Favorites in the ... menu? Right now, History and Apps provide a quickly drawn submenu to open things within. I expect the same functionality with favorites, but now I have to wait for the new panel to load, then finding what I'm looking for.
