Let's look at the concept of the new tab page - specifically, the most visited/"speed dial" grid of icons that lets you access your most used sites without having to go through your bookmarks. Here is how a few other browsers handle this feature:
- Opera and Vivaldi does this the very best. The icons/tiles vary their size with the amount of sites, giving you a large grid of fewer sites or a small grid of many sites. You can add a ton of sites. And most importantly, you can customize these sites easily by dragging from your bookmarks or manually adding sites tile by tile. It is trivial for a user to assemble a grid of their own personal favorites, and you never feel out of control.
- Firefox does this reasonably well. It can show 16 sites at the most, and while they are all automatic recommendations they can all be overridden by dragging a bookmark into a tile. It doesn't feel quite as flexible or manageable as Opera or Vivaldi and there's no way to do more than 16 tiles, but overall it works OK.
- Chrome does this the worst. It used to be really poor but they improved it a little recently. You can add up to 10 custom sites, with no further functionality. You also cannot re-order sites after they are created, and the tiles themselves are very small.
Sadly the current Edge build is definitely the most similar to Chrome so far. There is only a single row of 8 sites which is a very low amount, and customizing them is really cumbersome. Replacing a tile is a matter of deleting an existing tile and adding a new one in at the end, and there is no way to reorder the tiles once created. Like Chrome, the tiles are also pretty tiny. Additionally you can't actually name the tiles so they always use the URL as the title, which can be really confusing at times - especially with several sites on the same domain.
I would love to see an implementation that is closer to the way Opera of Vivaldi does it - there doesn't have to be a huge deal of in-depth customization, but the ability to add a larger amount of tiles as well as rename and reorder tiles would go a huge way. While the bookmarks bar and menu obviously serve their purpose, the grid on the new tab page is a very useful complement for when you quickly want an overview of your favorite sites.
Does anyone have further thoughts or insights here?
