Dev channel update to 82.0.453.2 is live

josh_bodner 

Two areas that are critical to my continued interest in this product:

1 The changes to the Dark theme.

In Canary you've changed the background tab colours to near black rather than the system accent colour (I hadn't realised that was the system accent colour, just thought you'd picked the same 'Overcast' 118,118,118 colour I have as the accent colour) and lightened the background of the dropdown and context menus. In this Dev there's just the menu colour change, not the background tab one. I'm hoping this is a sign of you taking the time to re-think this, not just that that change is coming but just hasn't reached the Dev channel yet. For me, the old dark theme was so perfect I was using it even when I wasn't normally choosing to use dark themes. Quite unexpectedly, over the last two months I've become very sensitive to large areas of light colour on screen and have been scrabbling to find dark themes I both like and can work with for all the programs on my laptop and apps on my (Android) phone. The former Edge dark theme (both background tabs and menu backgrounds) was so perfect for me I took the time to learn how to change the Firefox Dark theme (with userChrome.css - Firefox is currently my normal browser as Edge isn't up to being my normal use browser at least until you get the history sync working between desktop and mobile) to exactly correspond to the (now former) Edge dark theme in tabs, background tabs, toolbars, Urlbar, dropdown menus and panels, context menus, even extensions that open panes over or in the browser interface … and then also replicate the Edge theme by modifying the dark theme in Thunderbird, my email client of choice. But the new Dark theme in Edge, menus as in Dev and background tabs as here, is truly awful to me. For one (but by no means the only) thing, when I have a fair number of tabs open (which is almost always) I cannot easily make out the active tab's very dark grey in amongst the almost black background tabs. For me it is quite unusable. This single change would have me bidding Edge farewell, and just thanking the dev team for providing me, with the former dark theme, a template to make my Firefox and Thunderbird look the best they ever have with both attractive and very usable dark themes given my new need for such themes.

I believe you are making a fundamental mistake - the same mistake as the Microsoft Launcher team made last year with two successive beta updates that simply drove me to pay for Nova Launcher Premium. Some users volubly request something, and you just assume that everyone else also wants - or at least will be indifferent to - the same thing. You appear not to consider that some users will not just like the way the feature was, but it may well have been one of the things that drew them to the program in the first place. They're not voluble simply because they don't know you were thinking of changing it (or simply don't contribute to these forums anyway, like most users). When some want some UI change, you should see it as a request to add OPTIONS, not just change things.

For me this is a make-or-break issue. If other people want near black background tabs and lighter menus that's fine with me ... as long as I can retain what I had in those respects. Revert the change;  or have an appearance setting switch that the user can use to select the old dark theme or the new one (I don't care which is default); or put colour selectors for the background tab colours and menu background colours into settings. I don't care about the mechanism, but if you force the 'new' dark theme colours, I'm off.

2 The vertical scroll behaviour

Currently Edge has two vertical scrolling modes - call them 'touchscreen' and 'traditional desktop', as determined by the scrolling personality flag. Before I knew about that I just thought the scrolling was broken. It now appears that you intend to force 'touchscreen' mode on everyone when it's 'better'. The only touchscreen I have is my phone, which uses Android Edge, not this Edge. I use this Edge on a non-touchscreen laptop and expect proper, desktop-like scrolling from my programs on it. If I wanted a touchscreen device I'd get one and look for good touch-screen adapted apps for it. I don't. I want a proper desktop type scrolling - and HAVE IT NOW with that flag disabled. Why, WHY would you get rid of the great, solid appropriate behaviour you already have. For Goodness sake - all you should do is add a switch in settings to turn 'touchscreen scroll mode' on or off for the user to flip depending on hardware and taste instead of a hidden flag. That would be a plus point for the program, and you need all the plus points you can get given that classic Edge failed to find enough market and you guys basically need to convert a mass of Google Chrome and some Firefox users if this Edge is going to succeed. You need OPTIONS, not limits, and to e.g. offer a choice of scrolling modes. Not rip out a perfect scrolling mode suited to all the users NOT using touchscreens.

Do the smart thing, re-think this and just add a settings switch to switch between the existing touchscreen and non-touchscreen modes.