Forum Discussion
Reading List - Discussion
We wanted to thank everyone again for their feedback around Reading Lists. We have internally acknowledged that Reading List as a feature was not able to meet the needs of our users. While we do have some very passionate users of this feature, the truth is that it wasn’t used much in Legacy Edge. With these things in mind, we have decided to not implement this feature into chromium-based Edge.
For alternatives, we still believe that the ones mentioned in the original post are what will work best for users. Collections have had several new features implemented recently, and we encourage you to give them a try. If you’re curious as to where your Reading Lists went when you updated to new Edge, they should be located in your Favorites under the Other favorites folder listed as Reading List.
While we are not going to bring this feature to new Edge, we are always listening and making choices based on all your feedback. Please continue to send in the feedback about what you would love to see or what you think is missing!
Thanks,
The Microsoft Edge Team
Having Favorites, Reading Lists, Set Tabs Aside and Collections is too many options that kinda-sorta do the same thing (Save a page for later).
When looking for saved pages, you have Favorites, Reading Lists, Set Tabs Aside and Collections to look in. Plus, the bulk of users only understand the concept of "Add a Favorite".
A solution to all this would be only having a "Add to Favorites" option and store everything as a Favorite. You can be a bit smarter about adding and opening favorites to mimic the above functionality.
When adding a favorite, prompt to add content from the page (aka, Collections), or add related tabs (similar to how IE use to color code tabs) or just the current page.
When opening a favorite from a "Reading List" folder, prompt to remove the URL. When opening a URL from a favorites folder, ask to open the other favorites in the folder. Favorites "Collections" folder would replace the current "Collections" sidebar.
The problem is known, but all those storage have different benefits.
* Favourites - good to store large organised collection of links (ex. Links that you use for long time and more or less often)
* Reading list - good to store temporary list of saved pages with content in chronological order (ex. Some interesting articles that you wanted to read, but you do not have time for it right now, later you can just open the reading list and pick one of interesting ones)
* Tabs aside - good to keep current session of browser when you need to change context (ex. you are looking for materials for school presentation, but you need to keep everything as it is, and switch to do reading about Benjamin Franklin for tomorrow lesson)
* Collections - I do not have any usage of it right now, it looks like strange combination of options above with very slow and hard to use
If you look on other browsers:
Firefox allows you to save your session - similar to tabs aside in Edge
Safari offers you reading list for offline reading - Edge has reading list
Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer offers you Favourites - Edge has favourites
My suggestion to Edge developers would be to keep simple explanation to feature that you are developing. It is very hard to explain Collections feature for now. It is not clear what is the purpose to use it. I like some new possibilities in Collections, but I do not know if it should be enhanced Reading List, replacement of tabs aside, or something new.
As a summary for Collections, it could be best to keep original interface of tabs aside, and reading list along with new collections feature.
And as tabs aside - would internally use collections to store tabs aside.
And as reading list - one build in collection used to handle reading list interface.
Thanks to it, all user experience would be kept. The issue of looking for saved web page would be limited to favourites and collections with difference that favourites keep link of web page and collections keep offline page version.
