Discussion - Getting back to websites important to you

kopoku 

Answers to Questions

1.  How many groups of tabs did you have set aside in the Legacy Microsoft Edge?
   • 50+ on home computer and 50+ on work computer. 
2. How long did you typically keep these groups of set aside tabs?
   • Some are stored for months, over a year. 
   • Some are reviewed and saved again quite often, returning back to them every week or month to pick up where I left off. 
   • Some are temporary and returning back to it after I restart my computer
   • Some are saved for a couple days and then reviewed, read, watched and close.
3. Are you aware of or have you used the Recently closed tabs experience which is accessible in the More menu (…) and in the full page History experience (Edge 83 Canary/Dev/Beta)?
   
   1. Recently closed tabs automatically saves your 25 most recently closed tabs and browser windows with their tab history for 2 browser sessions. When you restore a recently closed tab or browser window, it is removed from Recently closed. You can use the Ctrl (CMD on macOS) + Shift + T shortcut to quickly restore closed tabs or browser windows. 
      •  I need saved grouped sessions, not single-tab history which quickly is lost when I browse over 100 websites a day.

   2. What do you think about the Recently closed tabs experience?

      • Useful if I accidently close a tab, browser crash, or accidently closing of browser. NOT the same as Set Tabs Aside and is not a useful replacement at all. 

4. Do you use the "Continue where you left" setting (edge://settings/onStartup) which automatically restores the tabs from your last active browser window on browser restart? Why or why not?

   • No because Edge Legacy is my primary browser. This may be useful for crashing a browser but does not address Set Tabs Aside use cases.

5. How do your use cases differ amongst Tab Set Aside, Collections, and Recently closed tabs? 

   • Collections has not filled any of my cases to-date. I see some useful features in exporting but is a mess and a pain to use. I much prefer Set Tabs Aside with the export features
   • Recently Closed Tabs is useful for immediate needs to recall a accidently closed tab or browser crash. Not useful for reviewing related tabs that were part of a browser session.
   • Set Tabs Aside I will detail separately 

• The tabs you set aside in the Legacy Microsoft Edge were migrated to the "Other favorites" folder during the first run experience. 
  • Horrific. I now have 69 sub folders and difficult to see what all of it is and is polluting my favorite list. Favorites/Bookmarks are sites I visit everyday, not a sampling of my browsing history. I need them migrated back to Set Tabs Aside feature!
• Collections created using the "Add all tabs to a new Collection" are named using a date-time format e.g. Month Day, Year. 
  • Closer, but missing 2 critical features. First, it needs to close all tabs in window when adding to collection. Second, it needs to remove that group and all tabs from Collections when opening them all.

Set Tabs Aside Use Cases:

As a DevOps Engineer, I am constantly searching Google/Bing for how to do something in PowerShell, C#, or other language. I find multiple examples of what may or may not work. This brings me to 5-7 related tabs plus the search tab. Quite often, I have to stop and come back to this work. I Set Tabs Aside to put that research into a grouped session. Now I have a clean browser to work on a different task. I may or may not come back to this for a few weeks. When I do, I click to return all the tabs and pick up where I left off. The tabs that provide the most useful information, I send the article to OneNote for permanent reference with link and data intact. 

As an IT user, I often start reading a Wiki to learn a new topic. I click on 5-7 different links and start reading. Sometimes, I have actions to take such as figuring out how to do this install or get access to all that I need. As this is something I do partially through the day and have other tasks to complete, I will Set Tabs Aside so that I can pick back up later and have a clean browser to work on the next task.

As a user, I go through headlines on a site and open up several tabs of what I would like to read. Some are longer than I want to read at the moment. I go to next tab and read it's story. This can lead to 50 tabs open and reading maybe 45 of them at a time. I don't want to lose the others, so I Set Tabs Aside and close everything down. I do something else for a bit, watching tv, gaming, life. I may come back and read the latest news. Maybe a day later, or weeks later, I will pick up where I left off on the larger articles and restore those tabs and then close them when I'm done.

In all of these scenarios, I am wanting to group a set of tabs together to triage/review/read later. The goal is get them out of the way so I can have a clutter free browsing experience for other tasks. When I'm ready, I restore them to continue working towards closing them. This is why they are not Favorites. Favorites are intended to be revisited over and over again. For example, going to TechCommunity for regular consumption. Collections is close, but it is keeping my tabs when I add to them and not removing the temporary session when I open them. I need the same behavior of Set Tabs Aside which allows me to group these tabs into a session and close the other tabs. When I restore them, I need the Collection to go away. If I need to save them again, I will set them aside with what is left.