Dev channel update to 90.0.818.0 is live

josh_bodner 

Last week you got my immediate reaction to the loss of the toolbar area at the top of the More menu and the new Extensions button. Now my more considered opinion, after a week pf thought, which still includes the fact that your changes as are have made Edge unusable for me. This time a worked example with illustration.

I have currently 32 extensions installed, five currently disabled, leaving 27. I can fit a maximum of 10 on the toolbar while still leaving the minimum (to me) usable omnibox/address bar length, which leaves 17 extensions whose buttons I cannot fit on the toolbar, some of which I never need the buttons for (because the extension is just active when enabled) but a bunch where I need the toolbar buttons, whether to trigger the main action, or to trigger other actions in the button's context menu etc.

Now consider the two views of the top right of my Edge window, as was with extra extension area in the More menu  on the left, and as is now with the new extensions button:

So, suppose I am wanting to use, not manage, some extensions. Suppose I want to click on, say, Tab Session Manager. As was, left part of the picture, I click on the More button, and at the top is, essentially, a slide out expansion (I'd call it extension, but that would get confusing) of the toolbar - strips of 'more toolbar', 6 buttons long, so 3 strips includes all my 17 extensions that there isn't room for in the main toolbar. Each strip is the height of the toolbar, the buttons are the same icons, the same size as they would be on the toolbar, and they react - to mouseover, left click, right click - exactly the same as on the toolbar. And I can re-order them, just like on the main toolbar, so e.g. the ones I need to right or left click on often are at the top, the ones never clicked on at the bottom, and I can re-order them, like in the toolbar, into meaningful (to me) groups. Basically the top area of the more menu creates, in effect, a telescopic toolbar. And when I need to click on e.g. Tab Session Manager, I click on the More button and there are all 17 'hidden' extensions' buttons, right by the pointer, all visible, and its not made harder to find the right one by having the 10 buttons already on the toolbar repeated in the toolbar expansion section making it harder to find the one amongst 17 rather than 27.

This is good for using extensions, rather than managing them. It's s telescoping toolbar for people who use many extensions.

But now consider the right part of the picture and how things are now. I click on the new extensions button and I get - not more toolbar telescoping out, but an extensions manager. Something completely different that's fine for managing extensions, but not using them. I click, the dropdown opens and, I can't even see half of my extensions, including the one I want. I have to go and scroll, and I can't re-order my extensions, to put the ones that are not on the main toolbar but I often need to pick near the top. It's one extension button per line, not 6 so I have to move the pointer much further to get to any of them - plus scrolling for many, with the fact that the 10 buttons that are ALREADY on the toolbar are there too, making the searching and scrolling for the one I want even worse. And this is different to the toolbar - the on mouseover name display is now printed taking up room permanently, and the right-click context menu is replaced by three dot more menus. It is far, far more user unfriendly than how things were in the left view in the picture for using, rather than managing, extensions.

And for me completely unacceptable for use, and if this is how things are going forwards, I will neither use nor recommend Edge.

Last week I suggested some changes to the new extensions button allowing options to customise it to be more of a toolbar extension might be OK. Having thought about it since, I no longer believe that is a viable way forward. Making it able to be a more usable toolbar extension would actually make it worse as a toolbar manager, but it would never be as good a toolbar extension.

My suggestion, and frankly the only way I can see this being acceptable, is if you leave your new extensions manager button (as you say many people want such an extension manager - I don't, but I'm fine with it being there if I can turn it off in Appearance), but STOP turning it off making extension buttons on the toolbar invisible (in the same way that turning off the Favourites button doesn't make all the favourites disappear off the favourites bar), and ADD BACK the toolbar extension area AS WELL. These are two conceptually different tools, and you should have BOTH. Extensions button as now, but able to be turned off WITHOUT that making any extension buttons on the toolbar invisible, for managing extensions; and toolbar extensions area like the old one at the top of the More menu as a telescoping toolbar for those needing to use more than 10 or so extensions buttons. You COULD (for me, don't know about others) put the toolbar extension area back separate from the More menu: a separate button on the end of the extension buttons toolbar that just opens the dropdown of just the buttons not visible on the toolbar - which, after all, is what huge numbers of programs, including many Microsoft programs, do when there are too many buttons to display for the length of toolbar - that button opens  a menu of the buttons not displayed, NOT the customise toolbar dialogue, which is a separate thing. In fact I'd like that. But that or put it back at the top of the more menu, until/unless you do one or the other, that's it for me with Edge, using or recommending. Which would be a shame, as for that brief period between the new downloads and this change, Edge had actually become a usable browser for me.

PLEASE think this through, see that people with a lot of extensions that need a toolbar button to left and right click need a proper 'expand the toolbar to see the ones there aren't room for' option, and realise that this extension manager isn't it. It's not one tool or the other - you can have and need both.