Deployment - Fonts, Favorites, Sync

Deleted  "To address your original post, specifically item #3 -- have you tried our new way of managing favorites? You can access it three ways: navigating to edge://favorites/, using CTRL + SHIFT + O, or by clicking the Favorites star then selecting "Manage favorites." This will give your volunteers the option to navigate/search through static and distinctly spaced tiles instead of the dynamic nesting ones in the regular drop down.   Hopefully that will adequately meet those accessibility needs! If not, can you please give us more details about what would be necessary?"

Thank you for your advice.  I had not considered using "Manage Favorites" (a tool intended for editing, deleting and moving Favorites) as a substitute for the Favorites menus.  It works, I guess, if nobody hits an "X" and deletes a Favorite, or others alters the "Manage Favorites" list.

But it is -- to be both frank and blunt -- an absurd workaround.  The problem exists in the flyout menu structure itself, which is both unnecessarily complicated and hard to manage.

My preference would be to eliminate flyouts entirely and use the EdgeClassic nested list motif. The EdgeClassic nested list UI works extremely well, and presents none of the issues that the Chrome-clone flyout UI presents. Trying to add fixes to the flyout motif is just putting lipstick on the pig, as far as I am concerned.

And, to be entirely clear, I have no expectation at this point that Microsoft is going to change the Favorites menu structure from flyout to nested list.  This has been a topic of concern by a significant number of Insiders for close to 9 months now, and Microsoft has never responded to any of the numerous posts on this issue.  With launch in about 10 days, it is not realistic to expect Microsoft to do anything before launch, and after launch, the flyout menu structure will, I am afraid, be set in stone.

But, let me give you a demonstration about how absurd the flyout motif is, using an example given in the thread "Please -Bring over the classic Edge Favorites experience with pin-able side menu!"  I think that the example (screenshots are taken from my personal setup, which uses the nested menu structure extensively) will give you a better understanding of the reason why Insiders have been requesting that Microsoft go back to the EdgeLegacy nested list UI for Favorites.

As background, keep in mind that I am trying to do something very simple -- get to this specific bookmark/favorite as it appears in a nested list (Technology, Linux, Virtual Machine, OSBoxes):

Now, keeping that level of simplicity in mind, watch the steps I need to take (and the mess that the flyout menus make of the screen) while I am taking the steps needed to get to that Favorite using the flyout menu structure.

In each screenshot, the menu outlined in yellow is the menu that opened as a result of the click, that is, the "active menu".

Step 1: Click on the "Favorites Icon"

A dropdown menu appears:

Step 2: Click on "Other Favorites"

A flyout opens to the left:

Step 3: Click on "Technology"

Another flyout opens to the left:

Step 4: Click on "Linux"

A flyout opens to the right, overlaying menus 1 and 2:

Step 5: Click on "Virtual Machines"

A flyout opens to the left, overlaying menu 3:

Finally, after playing Whack-a-Mole with five flyout screens opening on top of one another, I can actually click on the "OS Boxes" link:

Before going on, I invite you to look at that last screen shot.  Could you tell me, just by looking at the screen how I got to that link and where I am in the menu structure?  Or tell me what menu is active and what menus are not without the yellow box outline I put in indicating the active menu? Or even tell what screens are on top of each other at this point?

Others have put forth quite a number of reasons why the EdgeLegacy nested list menu structure is superior to the Chrome-clone flyout menu structure, but I focus on two other issues, both related to accessibility:

(1) the flyout UI is very difficult to handle by anyone who has an deficiencies in small motor control, because the flyouts are not stable in the way that the nested list in EdgeClassic is stable; and

(2) the flyout UI is similarly very difficult (almost impossible, in fact) to use by anyone who has hand tremor issues.

I'll grant you that I could ask volunteers to ignore the in-built menu structure and use "Manage Favorites" instead.  I don't intend to do so, though, because "Manage Favorites" is intended for editing, moving and deleting Favorites -- managing them, in a word -- and isn't, in my opinion anyway, a suitable vehicle for simply accessing menu items.  The risk of a mistake -- deleting a Favorite or a Favorite Folder, for example -- is too high a risk, particularly in an environment where Favorites are synced across a number of computers.  A single, simple mistake, and 10-11 computer users are affected.

I've worked out a strategy to work around the flyout menu structure.  Basically, I'm going to ignore the flyout menu entirely.  I'm organizing Favorites (the railroad museum has 47 Favorites) into five categories, creating a Favorites Folder for each of the five categories, and putting the five Favorites Folders (and nothing else) on the Favorites Bar.  No Favorites at all will exist in the "Other Favorites" list.  What users will get are five dropdown menus on the Favorites Bar (each with between 3 and 7 Favorites) and no flyouts.   I've tested this with a few volunteers and it seems to work.

So if my workaround works, what is wrong? What's wrong is that bookmarks/favorites are a core component of using a browser productively, and setting a default UI that is not accessible to users with minor disabilities makes the browser less useful than it might otherwise be.  We should not have to be doing workarounds on something so basic as a user-friendly menu structure.

By the way, I want to thank you for being so responsive on this Forum.  You are a champ!

HotCakeX "You can test the Enterprise Edge insider stable from the link below ..."

The Enterprise version (the version downloaded through your link as MicrosoftEdgeEnterpriseX64.msi) and the consumer version (the version downloaded through Microsoft Insider as MicrosoftEdgeSetupBeta.exe) are the same version (both 79.0.309.56), but neither seem particularly useful for testing Microsoft's planned upgrade process through the Windows 10 updater because both are manual installs and neither imports favorites/bookmarks from EdgeClassic; both link to the EdgeChromium server's MSA if available**.  The difference between the two installs is that Enterprise removes EdgeClassic and the Windows Insider install does not.

"... there is a high chance that the version of Edge stable from that link is actually the final one ..."

I assume so, since the Enterprise version and the consumer version are identical build numbers. 

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** I brought one of the railroad's computers home for a clean install of Windows 10.  At present, the computer is a clean version of Windows 10 set to a local account rather than an MSA, so if EdgeChromium is going to install bookmarks from anywhere, it will be from EdgeClassic.  I'll take some time tomorrow to populate EdgeClassic with a set of "fingerprinted" favorites/bookmarks and see what happens when I install the Enterprise version.