Forum Discussion
Suggestion: Reader View
tomscharbach The Firefox reader view actually allows you to control the font, background color, text color and more. My guess is that those kinds of controls will also be worked into the Edge Chromium reading view tool before they issue a true "version 1.0" release, but may not be their first priority. Some other, more complicated under-the-hood features they've announced (like "Internet Explorer mode") are probably going to consume more of their time, with user-facing features like these not being developed until they have a pretty stable foundation to set them upon. I could be wrong, though, as I'm not a developer or anything.
rjbwdc "The Firefox reader view actually allows you to control the font, background color, text color and more."
I agree, and the controls (serif/sans-serif, font size, column width, line spacing, and background) are are readily accessible from a side menu and remarkably easy to use. I use Firefox in Reading View (relatively long technical and legal articles) much more than I use EdgeHTML because of those controls and because the Reading View pages are easily printed to PDF.
"My guess is that those kinds of controls will also be worked into the Edge Chromium reading view tool before they issue a true "version 1.0" release, but may not be their first priority. Some other, more complicated under-the-hood features they've announced (like "Internet Explorer mode") are probably going to consume more of their time, with user-facing features like these not being developed until they have a pretty stable foundation to set them upon. I could be wrong, though, as I'm not a developer or anything."
You pose an interesting question. The answer, I suspect, is going to have a lot to do with how Microsoft perceives its targeted customer base for Edge Chromium at the time of release. If the targeted base is businesses and enterprise customers, then the features most important to that base will have priority in development. I suspect that Microsoft will not release until the core user-facing features/functions of EdgeHTML are incorporated into Edge Chromium, but whether Microsoft will add "above and beyond" features before release to distinguish the new browser from Chrome is anybody's guess at this point.
tomscharbach From what little I've seen of the way they are talking about this new Edge, I think they are trying to target businesses and consumers at the same time. It seems to me like they want this to be the new do-everything browser—and my guess is that there's definitely room for that to happen.
The kinds of controls we're talking about are pretty standard for a reading view at this point—no one is going to release a native reader mode or a reader mode plugin without them. If Microsoft has moved reading view out of flags and is instead turning it on by default, then my suspicion is that they WILL add the kinds of controls we are talking about BEFORE Edge Chromium moves out of Beta.
But even if that's the case, back-end things like Explorer mode seem so complicated that they would probably want to make sure those are working cleanly and reliably before putting the final touches on the front-facing things like reading mode. Sort of like building the interior of the house before putting up the siding and the shutters? My guess is that their focus from here on out will be under-the-hood, rendering-engine-related things, then front-end design-related things, then finalizing the version 1.0 release.
Again, though, I'm talking from a place of absolutely zero anecdotal or professional insight. Pure, uneducated speculation.
