Forum Discussion
MicrosoftImprovements to history in Microsoft Edge
Great feature and I think it'll be a success, except for one disruptive omission:
Can the search text box be focused when we press CTRL+H, so we can start typing immediately?
This is muscle memory from every browser: CTRL+H -> start typing. I'm a little worried why some have asked this question, but it's not gotten an official response. For me personally, I know exactly what I'm looking for, but the address bar history is cluttered with way too many other results.
In all other browsers / Chromium Edge Prior This Update:
- Press CTRL+H
- Start typing
- Click the result
Newest Chromium Edge:
- Press CTRL+H
- Click the search icon
- Start typing
- Click the result
If not, could the Edge feedback team push to include a "fallback" to the previous history UI, i.e,. edge://history with CTRL+H, which did focus the search text box?
- William DevereuxI have good news for you! As of this morning's Canary update, you can now start typing to immediately search without clicking on the search icon. 🙂
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.
William Devereux Is there any plans to add an option to the settings to allow users to turn off the Internet Explorer style pop out history and just Ctrl+H straight to the chromium history tab? Because that's what people would really like.
I've stumbled upon thread on reddit that shows how to block this new history menu. You need to create shortcut and in target field you can add at the end:
--disable-features=msHistoryHub.
It's not guaranteed to work forever, but for now it's fine on last stable build.
The only issue is that it must be regular shortcut on desktop or sth. If you open Edge from start or have it pinned to taskbar it won't work.
Hope they could add this as a regular setting. Giving back focus to search field is step in good direction but this new menu is still small, and much worse to read and operate than old tab.
