Inking on Web Pages - Discussion

Elliot Kirk 

There's a lot of talk here about Microsoft in general, about Microsoft Edge Insider being worse than its classic counterpart, and about the need to be feature-identical at launch. (and... about Android?) 

I want to preface my response to your question by saying that I never used Inking on a daily basis; in fact, I've never used the feature at all beyond "seeing how it works". I'm not going to argue against it being added into the New Edge. It's one of the top pieces of feedback, and I can definitely see how it would be useful for people in lines of work other than mine. I can, however, talk about something remarkably similar to Add notes: Snip and Sketch. I use that tool multiple times a day, often to highlight graphical inconsistencies with Edge Canary that can't be captured with Send feedback's built in screenshot tools.

There are a lot of clever features in Add notes that I'd love to see in Snip and Sketch, and vice versa. I love that text notes are shown as bubbles with just a number, with the text displayed off to the side during an export. That would be a perfect addition to Snip and Sketch. It also turns out that I'm a huge fan of the clip functionality. Scrolling through the webpage while dragging a screenshot box? That's fantastic! There are definitely some things in Snip and Sketch which would greatly benefit the next Add Notes in Edge. Undo and Redo are always nice to have. A crop tool would be good for websites that don't work with Reading view. Zoom would be a great addition. Sure, multitouch zoom works in a pinch, but there's no "reset to actual size" button and if you use the keyboard to zoom in and out, good luck finding 100% again. There are of course the more pedestrian functions: Draw, Highlight, and Erase. Add notes can't live without them, even though I'm not able to aptly use them myself.

And let's talk about my "inability to use them" for a minute, shall we? Add Notes and Snip and Sketch are designed HEAVILY around pen based input. I don't own a Surface. I don't own a convertible laptop. Sure, I have a touch screen, but it isn't pen compatible. My primary form of input is a keyboard and mouse; I often use my laptop in a "docked" state. Add notes is nowhere near as bad as Snip and Sketch because it has the incredibly good text box tool that I never knew I needed, but the basic drawing is really, really bad. There are no shapes and no ways to draw a straight line. One would think that maybe there would be a dedicated tool, but no. Perhaps holding ctrl, shift, alt, or one of the other 102 keys on my keyboard would enable straight line mode? No! If I try to make an arrow or a box to indicate something's importance, it's going to look like a 5 year old with a coloring book. What about the highlighter? Well, it doesn't snap to text, so you're either going to use it carefully (slowly), or deal with another inaccurate squiggle. The eraser tool is fine, right? Sure, it's fine, but it's not great. You can't right click to erase. You can flip a surface pen over to use the eraser instantly (I'm only assuming because, again, I can't do that myself.), but you can't right click to get the same effect at the same speed. My mouse is special, it has back and and forwards buttons. Normally, these buttons would undo and redo actions. In Add notes, and also in Snip and Sketch, these awesome buttons do whatever the primary click button does. Why? Why do this? Right click doesn't do anything, which means you people had to decide to program this in! So yeah. Add notes is probably incredible with a Surface, but I don't have that. I could use Add notes if my line of work called for it, but I would constantly have the feeling that "this suite of tools isn't meant for MY computer." That's a really bad feeling to have.

I had planned on talking about the existing sharing options available in Add notes, but I don't use the tool myself, so let's move on to the third and final part of this text monolith:

Bugs.

Add notes in Classic Edge is really buggy. I have experimented with add notes for about an hour for the first time in over a year, and I've discovered that:

The back and forwards buttons will only mirror the action of the left mouse button after you've left clicked on the page at least once.

If you open and close Add notes on the New tab page, the page's loading circle will spin for 30 or more seconds. 

 The new tab page isn't supposed to ever display a loading circle.

If you activate Add notes on a secondary display of comparatively lower resolution, a massive empty space will be included with your notes experience, free of charge.

Do you want fries with that? This blank area is even included in exports.

Add notes takes a quick screenshot of the existing page when it's launched. There is an instant while the Add notes toolbar is initializing where you can drag and drop that screenshot instead of drawing on top of it.

Sometimes when you take a clip, it shows up in your clipboard as a blank gray square. I'm not posting it here because I fear it will break this post.

If you save or share your work, any ink already on the page will be converted into a png. Not only does this dramatically lower the quality of the ink by blurring the edges, but it makes the ink permanent - it can't be erased without closing and reopening Add notes.

Why am I making a laundry list bug report about software that may never be updated again? Because the Microsoft Edge team spent YEARS trying to fix these issues. Some people in this comment section are now expecting feature parity, without serious bugs, in two months. TWO MONTHS?!? That's not possible! Classic Edge's stability was, at least for me, legendarily awful. Yeah, I loved the favorites menu and the download manager and Cortana integration, but I often had to open up Chrome when submitting homework or doing anything that absolutely wasn't allowed to crash. I think we have made ourselves abundantly clear that Edge "is" everything detailed in this handy checklist: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge but more than anything we "need" a browser that won't self-destruct when we try to do basic things like drag tabs up above the address bar. (yes, that was a real, easy to reproduce bug on the stable version of Edge Classic that came with Windows 1803 or 1809, I don't remember which...) The Edge development team has been choosing their battles of what to focus on for launch in January; in my opinion, they've been choosing those battles very wisely. I would rather not have another glass mansion of unusable features, even if that means having only a solid foundation for now.