Forum Discussion
MicrosoftProvide run / open / save / save as options when downloading files - Discussion
Hello everyone,
Thanks so much for all the feedback provided regarding Open/SaveAs. We are now introducing an option for users using Edge version 87.0.629.0 and above to choose, for each download, whether they want to Open, Save As, Save, or Cancel a download. To enable this option, navigate to edge://settings/downloads and enable, "Ask me what to do with each download." Once you download a file after enabling that setting, you will have the option to Open, Save As, Save, or Cancel it. If you choose to open it directly, it will be downloaded to a temporary folder.
Additionally, we have exposed an option to directly delete downloaded files from your computer, in the browser so that you can easily clean up after downloading your files without leaving the browser.
To learn more about these features, please check out our post.
Fully agree with all you've said. Since Microsoft introduced the move to Chromium, the new browser is still broken in many ways and inferior to the proper Edge. I do not recommend using it in professional environments and a lot of companies I support or get involved with are not going to implement it, even moving away back to the classic Edge as long as it works. Surprisingly many work force are against the new Edge, as it breaks SharePoint sites, intranet resources and a whole lot of professional tools used on daily basis.
PeteMSTechCom, I have not observed that among IT staffs with any companies I work. Nor can I think of any professional features that are not improved in the new Edge (though I would acknowledge there may be some obscure features where that's possible). Single sign-on, support for profiles, better support for old IE-only sites, better overall web page compatibility -- those are all factors that have already driven all companies I see from Legacy Edge (or even holding out on IE) to new Edge.
More interesting for me has been the number of sites already moving from Chrome to Edge. I have seen several companies who wouldn't support old Edge, because it was less compatible with third-party sites than Chrome and didn't work with their internal sites that required IE. So they were previously on Chrome for most things, and IE when needed. They are now moving from Chrome to Edge. These are mostly MS shops (I'm sure very few on the Google ecosystem are doing this), but that's a great sign for MS that they're new Edge is helping tighten their relationships with many of their large clients.
Lastly, as an individual user, I miss this Run/Open feature a lot and the Inking directly on web pages (a little), but other than that (and even in spite of those deficiencies), I much prefer the new Edge for some of the same reasons as the businesses like Profiles (I don't know how I lived without these before) and the 100% web compatibility (so nice to no longer wonder if a site looks wrong because I'm in Edge), but also for more personal reasons: the new Collections feature is really handy for shopping (and will be even more useful when travel resumes after COVID-19) and access to any extension I want and better extension support.
My experience is exactly the opposite. Daily struggle with few users who are now on Edge Chromium or even worse still on Google Chrome facing a host of different issues. Starting with lot of MS Office online services, in particular SharePoint, through various intranet sites, web apps, business banking, SAP web apps, engineering rendering sites, high resolution internal production streaming, favourites storage, reading clipboard, amount of RAM & CPU utilised, etc. Strange enough, the combo Edge Classic and IE are going strong. Many users happy to go back. Seamless profile and favourites sync, SSO, integration between Edge and UWP apps and so on. Amazing touch & pen features and support on Surface devices, where the new Edge fails short and Chrome or Firefox are completely useless.
But the best of all is the way Edge Classic and all other UWP based browsers and apps instantly suspend on minimising to task bar and resume when required. Myself working across several different remote support and management systems, remote access, tenants, domains, web apps, etc. it's simply indispensable. Apart from Edge Classic I use few other UWP browsers from MS Store, once minimised, they only consume a tiny fraction of RAM & CPU, maintaining notifications in the background, same with all other UWP apps. Even MS Teams works way better in an UWP browser as web app than its native horrible resource hogging chromium based app. I tried to do the same performing the same tasks using the new Edge Chromium and it turned out to be impossible. The amount of RAM & CPU it needs is awful, minimising it to task bar doesn't change anything, running few different chromium based browsers plus 4-5 instances of native MS Teams kills even the latest Surface Book. Few more extensions cannot compensate the lack of usability in a professional environment.
PeteMSTechCom, some of that is definitely true and fair -- UWP apps are fantastic for resource usage. I wish native UWP had taken off more with developers. Legacy Edge was also indisputably MUCH better for Inking (though it sounds like that will be coming to new Edge at some point). However, note that the Teams native app is not based on the browser, so it is unaffected by the changes to Edge. Teams is an Electron app and that has not changed with Edge moving to Chromium. SharePoint on Premises, depending on the age of the site, and any site that needs ActiveX certainly still relies on IE -- but those never worked with the Legacy Edge either. In fact, the new Chromium Edge is MUCH better able to run IE pages internally without need to separately launch IE (new Edge effectively launches an IE session within itself, which you might call cheating, but it means the user doesn't need to worry about which browser to launch). For an IT team, this can significantly reduce management and training. Many sites were not fully compatible with Legacy Edge, and even more sites are not compatible with IE. So if previously only using IE and Edge, that left a significant portion of the Internet apparently broken. New Edge is compatible with 100% of the Internet EXCEPT for sites with ActiveX controls and the aging intranet sites that relied on obscure IE-only features, but because new Edge now includes a near flawless IE mode, this makes new Edge the single most compatible browser on the planet.
I don't dispute your performance concerns, but I've not experienced that -- our systems tend to be overpowered, so running dozens of tabs in either version of Edge has always been fine. However, I do find the new Edge better with many tabs for those rare crashes (rarer now than they were in Legacy Edge). Both IE and Legacy Edge were always terrible at bringing back all the open tabs following a crash or update. New Edge (like Chrome, Opera, and Firefox) come back up as if nothing ever happened. Amazing and makes it much safer to have 20-30 or more tabs open at a time with little risk to losing everything.
And so many new features that really make a huge difference for many people on our team -- Collections (many people don't use them, but those who do love them), the ability to "install" any page as an app has been a huge boon. Profiles have also been transformative to many clients (I couldn't live without them now myself). Syncing is now supported even for on-premises hosted domains (was not possible under Legacy Edge), and syncing supports many more features in the browser than in Legacy Edge... and many more new benefits...
The topic of this thread (the missing the Open/Run options) is my personal single biggest gripe with new Edge (to the point that sometimes I'll actually open IE just for this feature), with lack of inking being my second biggest pain point.
