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JimGrisham's avatar
JimGrisham
Steel Contributor
Aug 06, 2020

Sharing bookmarks (favorites) with other users / synced profiles in Edge

{I haven't seen this discussed yet; apologies if this duplicates an existing thread}

 

It occurred to me this morning that it would be quite nice to be able to share a bookmark folder (and its contents) with another user who has enabled profile syncing in the new chromium-based Edge browser.

 

Example use case / user story:

  1. I create a new folder in 'Favorites' and add a few bookmarks / favorites to that folder.
  2. On the 'Manage Favorites' screen, I right-click on the folder from step 1 and select 'Sharing...' from the contextual menu.
  3. Using an interface similar to that in OneDrive or other Office applications, I add a user's e-mail address to send an invitation, and choose if they should have read-only or read-write access.
    1. e.g. I enter the e-mail address associated with my wife's Microsoft account
  4. The invited user gets a notification and/or e-mail message, and upon accepting, my new shared folder shows up in their Favorites hierarchy.
    1. e.g. Now my wife can see the Favorites I have added to that folder
  5. Any further Favorites or subfolders added to a read/write shared folder appear automatically to any synced users Favorites lists

 

In addition to sharing Favorites with different people or teams, those (like me) using multiple synced Edge profiles on the same computer for different purposes could share a common folder between them. At the moment I add favorites to Azure and M365 config and doc pages to one profile, and then find myself having to copy them to other profiles.

(This is less of a concern for a single user logged into a single Windows user session -- unlike tabs which cannot be presently dragged between Edge windows belonging to different profiles, Favorites folders can thankfully be drag-copied to other Edge windows.)

 

I'm not sure if any other browser vendor is currently doing any/all of this, so it may be a way for Edge to stand out in the field. Even if current back-end infrastructure can't support this, perhaps discussing it now might enable it to be feasible several releases down the road.

 

Finally, I realize that in some cases it would make more sense for users to manually store links on a SharePoint page or in a OneNote notebook, but for small teams or families, and considering all of the UX work going into favorite management inside the browser, a purely (from the user's perspective) browser-based solution seems to have significant value.

 

 - Jim

 

P.S. Unrelated, and while I'm sure it's in the docs somewhere, the "Start a Conversation" page here has fields for "Labels" and "Add Tags", but does not explain the difference between the two nor their intended function (either on the page itself or in tooltips).

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