Quickly share links with yourself or others with the new share menu

[William Devereux]

People share links with family, friends, and coworkers every day, but sharing is often more complex and frustrating than it should be due to seemingly unnecessary steps and options. Today, we’re excited to share (pardon the pun) what we’re doing to improve this experience with the new share menu in Microsoft Edge.

Share to Outlook, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and more

With the new share menu, it’s easy to share links via your favorite services, from email to social networks. Best of all, you don’t need to install an app or set up anything for it to work. Simply select a service to open the site in a new tab, making it easy to quickly add some thoughts, tag a friend, or select a private group to share with. The initial list of supported services includes Outlook, Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, and we will continue to add additional services in the coming weeks and months. To start sharing, open the Settings and More menu () and select Share.

Want to share a link via an app on your computer or to a nearby device? Just select More sharing options to open the native share menu on Windows or macOS. You can also share to your default email client using the Default mail app button as well.

Share with yourself

We’ve also heard that sharing isn’t just for sending content to other people. Sometimes you just need to send something to yourself so you can refer back to it later. Email is a very common way of doing this, but many users often admit to feeling embarrassed about sending themselves an email rather than using more efficient tools. We want to embrace this in Microsoft Edge and help you be more productive no matter what organizational system you use.

To share with yourself, you can add one or more Outlook or Gmail accounts in the Email to myself section. Once you’ve selected a service and entered your email address, clicking on the account will instantly compose a new email and pre-populate your account in the To line—all you need to do is click send. We hope this will save you time and help you remember something later in just a few clicks.

This is just the beginning of our journey to make sharing faster and easier than ever in Microsoft Edge. The new Share menu is currently rolling out to users in the Canary and Dev channels. In the next few days, we'll also be adding a Microsoft Edge share menu flag in Canary for those of you who don't want to wait.

Please let us know what you think of the new share menu in the comments below, as well as via the in-app feedback tool. Have a favorite service you’d like us to support? We’d love to hear that as well. Happy sharing!

— William Devereux, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Edge

[#2]

Awesome! Was worried the Share menu wouldn't get any love. But this all looks very promising 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

[#3]

This is so good. I use a Pro X as my tablet and the lack of support for Windows share option is a pain in the arse.

[#4]

Wonderful! Have been waiting for this for many years. Used a browser extension for this so far, but that's no longer needed now. Thank you so much for adding this feature. 🙏

[#5]

WIll there be a way to control which icons are listed and there order similar to how the iOS share experience is customizable. There are icons present which I will never use and I don't want the clutter. Also, for a user like my mother, I want to remove everything she will not use as it can confuse her. For example, the Gmail icon may be interpreted as the one to select when sharing to a Gmail user not sharing from a Gmail user.

In regard to the Email to myself section, why is this not an MRU of all email recipients, again like the iOS share UI. While I do email myself every once in a while, I share via email with others more yet there is no mechanism to persist these others, though I could lie and enter them as myself.

[#6]

This looks like a welcome new addition, my initial thought is that it might be nice to optionally be able to put a "share" in the address bar, either next to the QR code thing, or even have the QR code thing be moved into the share menu when you have the share button in the address bar.
Thanks for continuing all the great work

[#7]

I still see the old Share menu...

[#8]

me too

[#9]

I still have a "Gmail This" bookmarklet on my bookmark bar. I can finally delete it. Thanks for adding this share feature! Can you please make a keyboard shortcut for sharing, as well?

[#10]

Could the option to send a page to another device be added to this menu too?
I have been using that feature and was surprised not to find it in the Share menu.

[#11]

Still have the old share on my Version 93.0.946.1 (Offizielles Build) dev (64-Bit).
German Language.
Regards. Martin Klein.

[#12]

@William Devereux very nice, the close button though is very small... what about clicking outside the menu to close it?

[#13]

As I can see many of us are still seeing the old share menu...

[#14]

Yes, a shortcut to open the Share menu would be great!

[#15]

Please make this optional. I prefer the native share sheet, since it has the Your Phone app, and Samsung Flow, etc..., if you can add the share targets from the native share sheet into Edge's new share menu, then I would be ok with it. Also, don't show any websites or services I haven't installed or opened before by default, I feel it should function similarly to how Edge finds possible search engines and adds them to the list search engines I can choose from.

[#16]

Sorry but it doesn't seem to work for me as nothing has changed.
Do I have to take a particular action?

[#17]

My share menu is greyed out, how do I enable this?

[#18]

Needs ToDo/Planner task as a share option

[#19]

@William Devereux 

I have to admit, I don't like this new share menu (imo it's the worst feature of Chrome for Android as well). Needing two steps to get to the OS share sheet, which as of now can offer almost identical functionality, is an unnecessary hurdle.  
But I do get that it might be useful to others.

However, please give us the option to at least customize it a bit more, e.g. removing share targets like "Facebook", which is completely irrelevant to me.

Or even better, add a setting to switch back to the old behavior, skipping the new share sheet and directly opening the OS share dialog.

Another thing I noticed: Installed PWAs which support the Share Target API don't appear in the share menu yet, even though they are literally installed by Edge (and even show up on the OS share sheet). I strongly believe this should be added.

[#20]

Drawing from others' feedback, the "two separate share features" or "nested share features menus" seem a little strange. I'm not sure any platform has executed it perfectly, but having an app-specific share feature _plus_ a separate standard OS share feature seems redundant and confusing. (Respectfully, it reminds me of the old criticism of Microsoft Office just adding features on top of features. I've been impressed with the thoughtful shift to more integrated, user-focused features.)

How might we unify the share feature so that it's presented in a unified way with any app-specific or MS-identified-app-relevant sharing on, say, a top "shelf"/row and the remaining enabled OS standard sharing on a bottom "shelf"/row? Ideally these share vectors could be enabled, hidden, (re)arranged, or new share vectors added by the user.

I'll concede that I may be subconsciously describing iOS/iPadOS sharing but sharing is becoming ubiquitous and a single fly-out/window/pane approach seems more natural than the current bifurcated Edge/OS sharing model.