Introducing web capture for Microsoft Edge

Microsoft

Since the release of the new Microsoft Edge, we have heard a lot of feedback about missing the web notes tool that allowed you to capture and mark up content across the web. Frankly, we’ve missed it too! But first, we wanted to make it better. While web notes was a great feature, there was also room for improvement. Many of you reported using it for capturing quick screenshots to copy or share, while others loved the ability to to mark-up full webpages with scrolling. So, we designed the new screenshot feature, web capture, with this in mind and are excited to introduce the basic screen capture functionality to our Dev and Canary builds. In the near future, you can expect to see more functionalities added to web capture, like adding ink or highlights to your captures, capturing full webpages, and scrolling while marking them.

 

To try it out, use the Settings and more menu (...) in the top right corner of the browser and select Web capture.

 
 

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When you open web capture, you can use the selection tool to capture just the content you want. We found that sometimes you want more than what you’re able to see on the webpage, so we have added the ability for you to select content lower down on the page. To do this, just hold down the selection tool and drag to the bottom of the page; the page will automatically start to scroll so that you can capture everything you need in one go.

 

Once you are done with the capture, you will see a menu with a couple of options: 'Copy' and 'Add notes'. Click Copy to add the image to your clipboard. It will then be available for you to paste into any application. If you want to mark up the screenshot with inking tools, select the Add notes option. You will see the image in a dialog box where you can draw on it, share, save and copy with your annotations. 

 

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If you love web capture and want to access the tool more quickly, you can pin it directly to your browser toolbar.  Just right click on the option in the Settings and more menu (...) and select Show in toolbar. You can also use the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+S) to invoke web capture.

Try out the new tool and let us know what you think! We love hearing your feedback. From within Microsoft Edge, you can go to “…” menu > Help and feedback > Send feedback, or simply use the shortcut (Shift+Alt+I) to open the feedback tool.

 

- The Microsoft Edge Product Team

 

157 Replies

I have it on Edge Dev right now. I do and need to take screenshots and annotate them regularly but web capture at its current state is not very helpful for me, I mean it works, it takes screenshots as it's supposed to :)

 

There is a thread dedicated to this feature, a lot of good suggestions mentioned there, please consider all of them and implement the most requested ones.

 

Some missing features that I'm looking for: (annotating/writing on web page, take screenshot while scrolling down a web page, add sticky notes to the web captures, integration with OneNote, option for "save as" to save the web capture to a specific place instead of the default downlaods folder, etc)

 

Another thing I should mention is that this feature is very useful for other operation systems (Linux/Mac) which might not have something like Snip & Sketch, so a built-in tool in the browser will come handy.

 

Thanks

@HotCakeX thanks for the super prompt reply on the post. You can take screenshots while scrolling with web capture today. We are also adding the capability to capture entire webpage and annotate on top similar to Microsoft Edge legacy. There are also other updates planned for the feature beyond that. Please stay tuned. 

Thanks, happy to hear that, great job so far!
Of course dragging the selection rectangle to scroll does not work with touch, as expected. I wish someone would make a browser for Windows where touch/tablet usage sits at a high priority on its UX design. How do I miss the tablet UX (but ONLY the UX) of Metro IE.
I use Surface Book 3 and dragging and scrolling with touch works as expected.

Quick suggestion, there should option to upload screenshot to cloud or image host service.

1.Take screenshot
2.Upload it online (For example dropbox)
3.Share the link with friend
Like imgur

Suggestion second, gif creation and screen recording tool so that we dont have to take help of third party programs.
I'm talking about specifically about the web capture feature. With mouse it is possible to capture more than the visible area of the website by moving the mouse to the edges of the window while grabbing the selection rectangle. With touch, trying to move the rectangle past the edge of the window is impossible and attempting to do a normal scroll outside of the rectangle just cancels the whole operation.

@Migue333 that's unexpected. We will investigate and fix this soon.  

Gif is an old unoptimized format. you can record a 1 minute 1080p clip in HVEC (H.265) format in less than 5MB with high quality. doing the same thing in Gif will give you a roughly ~500MB file size.
And there is also WebP with tons of advantages over Gif.

@vygadeka 

This feature is not enabled in my Edge Dev build (Version 87.0.644.4 (Official build) dev (64-bit)) - is it available or not, you appear to have pre-announced a feature that isnt in the build?!?

 

It's using controlled feature rollout, only available to a subset of insiders.

@vygadeka 

This is helpful feature , it would be nice to have option like open Snipping Tools or Snip & Sketch tools and there we have some additional options for editing. 

In addition, this could have same options as Snip & Sketch tools since it has similar requirements.

There's a way to do that. There's a share button on the capture preview. Just share it to the snip & sketch app and done.
That's a good point. actually, with this method I can save it to OneNote as well, think of it as OneNote integration that I was looking for. thanks :)

@Reza_Ameri-Archived 

 

I agree - make it part of Snip & Sketch - why reinvent the wheel. The Share is a couple of extra unnecessary steps 

There are reasons for that:

Snip & Sketch isn't available on other OSes such as Linux and Mac which are target platforms for the new Microsoft Edge.

Snip & Sketch doesn't support taking screenshot of a web page while scrolling down which is super useful. Snip & Sketch only can take screenshot of that is displayed on the screen.

also if they bring back all the features from Edge legacy, there's gonna be sticky notes and ability to type on capture, none of which are available on Snip & Sketch.

so yeah that's enough reasons to develop this into Edge.

@HotCakeX So develop Snip & Sketch for the other OS's and platforms like they are for Edge... perhaps as a feature set of Sticky Notes. Better than having multiple apps. Still waiting on them making sense of all their Task Management apps which are inconsistent at best. 

Sticky notes and Snip & sketch are entirely separate apps, merging them doesn't make sense.
one takes screenshots, the other takes text notes.
it's like saying instead of using notebooks for your class, use a drawing board.

developing this feature into Edge is easier and logical than publishing apps for other OSes. this can count as an advantage for the browser.
Build the functionality into Collections
Build the functionality into Sticky Notes
Build the functionality into the OneNote Web Clipper
Build the functionality into Snip n Sketch

My point is, how many apps does MS need that do almost, but not quite the same thing?