Why, hello there, Insiders! As mentioned last month, we are moving these updates to once a month. Welcome to September’s Top Feedback update! We are talking about several items this month, including one being marked as Addressed. As expected, moving to a monthly posting cadence provides y’all with larger details on where we are with your feedback, and this update will go over all of those changes!
Before hopping into this month’s update, there are a couple of things that should be noted. We have moved to our 4-week release cadence with Edge 94, now in our Stable channel. Additionally, Beta will receive Edge 95 this week, making Edge 96 the base version this month in Canary and Dev channels. For our Mac Insiders, this means that the new update experience is on its way to you in Beta! Additionally, in response to developer feedback, we updated our add ons website to let you sign in to the Partner Center using GitHub! And last, but certainly not least, a very tiny bit of fanfare for the launch of the new Edge on Xbox.
Now onto your regular feedback updates! First, let’s talk about the good news of what is being Addressed this month. We finished rolling out pick up where you left off for PDFs! This means that you can now easily continue from where you exited in a PDF, just like you can a Word document or PowerPoint deck. We have been continuously iterating on our PDF reader outside of this list, too. Over the past month, we also implemented the ability to add text to any part of the PDF, making it much easier to input text when a PDF doesn’t seem to be editable. Keep the feedback coming, the team is listening and wants to ensure the PDF reader is the best tool for you.
While we aren’t updating the status to a couple of items here, we did want to ensure you all had updates for them in this month’s post. For Allow users to put individual tabs to sleep, we’ve implemented a new option in Settings to help address the feedback we heard from y’all. You can now set your inactive tabs to be slept after 30 seconds of inactivity so more of your tabs go to sleep faster, resulting in less need to wait or take the time to put them to sleep individually. We continue to monitor feedback, but if you would like us to know about other changes you’d like to see for sleeping tabs, be sure to head over to the discussion thread and leave us a comment!
Next up, an update for Provide an option to prevent auto-play of video and audio when you open a website. We have taken a look at feedback on this issue and identified two key items here; first, we have fixed the Limit option for Media Autoplay to be more aligned with Chrome, and second, we have made Limit the default in Edge 93. Since then, we have seen a 75% drop in feedback around autoplaying media. We have also added additional logging that can help diagnose any new feedback around autoplay and continue to listen to your feedback as you send it in. We’ll leave this on the list until next month as we keep an ear out for other reports; at that point we will consider this Addressed.
Now onto your feedback around a couple of tabs requests. We are moving Add ability to close tabs via double-click to Planned! While we do not have a time frame in which you can expect to see this right now, but we will update you here once we have more to share. Please do hop into its discussion thread to let us know more about how this would benefit you (or if you think it shouldn’t be an option, that’s valid feedback, too). Users can move Vertical Tabs to the right side of the screen has no update, but the team continues to review feedback around this, so please send that in for them!
Not seeing an update for something that you have been waiting for? Know that the team is still looking at feedback for these items, or working hard on the ones we have already planned. We’d love to continue to hear from you, so please head to the … menu > Help and feedback > Send feedback to let us know what you would like to see in the browser to help your browsing experience, or to let us know of any issues you’ve spotted. We look forward to seeing your thoughts!
Make tabs more square and less rounded, like the current version of Microsoft Edge
47 weeks
Not Planned
MSA profile picture is not updating
56 weeks
And here’s the list of top “quality areas” that we’re actively working on in response to your feedback:
Bring more extensions to the extensions store
Edge should use less memory than it does
Edge should use less CPU than it does
Scrolling should feel smoother for web pages
Scrolling should feel smoother for PDF files
Opening a new tab is too slow
Update does not always work reliably
Definitions:
Addressed – Changes to address this feedback are visible to all users in the Canary and Dev channels.
Not Planned – We don’t currently plan to address this feedback, though we will continue to track it and reconsider our approach if needed.
Planned for… – We’re working on this and currently plan for it to be addressed in the Canary channel before the end of the month indicated.
Planned - We have reviewed this feedback and have a plan to address it. However, we aren't ready to share a target time frame just yet.
Alternative Planned - We don’t currently plan to directly address this feedback; however, we are working on addressing this in the form of a new feature.
In Discussion – We’ve reviewed this feedback and to learn more we have started a discussion about it here in the Microsoft Edge Insider Forum.
Under Review – We are reviewing this feedback internally and do not have a plan to share at this time.
Quality Area – We will give extra weight to fixes and opportunities in this area. Please continue to report specific bugs and make specific asks.
It would be safe to say that new features announced by edge team are unlikely to result in any significant market share gain. There will be need for serious introspection if the win11 does not improve browser's prospects.
@MissyQ It seems that Provide an option to prevent auto-play of video and audio when you open a website has become Provide an option to limit auto-play of video and audio when you open a website. The 75% drop in feedback around autoplaying media indicates that autoplay is not prevented. If the intent is to consider this Addressed at the end of the month, it would be good to change the wording to reflect this change of target.
Almost all news sites, including links from msn, autoplay. I stopped providing feedback because I thought that Planned meant preventing autoplay, not limiting it.
If the intent is to continue to address the feedback to prevent autoplay of media, maybe a new item could be added to the list.
Blocking autoplay was a valued feature of legacy Edge for me and for those around me. I hope the team will consider addressing the option to prevent autoplay as well as simply limiting it.
Hello ms4132, I would like to understand your issue better - "Almost all news sites, including links from msn, autoplay." - In this scenario does the video play with audio or is the audio muted ?
@sushraja Thank you for the clarifying question. On some sites, the audio plays along with the video and on some the audio is muted.
On most video streaming sites, both audio and video autoplay.
On news sites, it is more of a mix between audio muted or not. I assume that is a choice by the news site rather than a feature from Edge, but I have not tested it with other browsers to verify the assumption.
For me, the goal is to prevent all autoplay of video and audio unless I click to start it, or specifically enable autoplay for a site.
The case where some sites are able to play audio through autoplay feel like a bug in limit's implementation - limit itself is supposed to block such playback. Do the sites where you experience this show up in edge://media-engagement/ with the isHigh column reporting as yes.
Currently limit allows playback of media with no audio, because the hypothesis here is that users are complaining about the unexpected audio when they ask for auto play block. I would like to understand "the goal is to prevent all autoplay of video and audio unless I click to start it," a bit more
1. Would you expect sites like say https://giphy.com/ to not autoplay ? Explaining the question: That site primarily serves gifs/animated images but at times sites can use video elements with no audio to the same effect and I would like to understand your expectation of how you think the browser should handle this.
2. Would you expect that on a site like https://twitter.com/TwitterVideo, the user has to perform an additional action for the videos on each tweet to play ?
@sushraja Thank you for the additional clarifying questions.
Let me start with "prevent auto-play of video and audio" in the description. It is not clear to me how this would be interpreted to mean that video is allowed as long as it does not have audio.
For your specific questions. In both cases, I would like to have a setting that will prevent auto-play of video and audio, unless I change the setting in the site permissions.
In the early days of the new Edge, Block was an option in addition to Limit. It is still available using a flag, but does not seem to behave differently from Limit. Then I could use Site Permissions -> Media Autoplay to add any site I did not want this to apply to in the Allow section.
It is a personal preference, but in the absence of this site permission Allow exception, I would want site 1 and site 2 from your message to prevent autoplay video and audio unless I click on the video/audio item. But an Allow list would let the user make the choice.
For me the issue is that the "Limit" option decides to enable autoplay on sites where I have manually played videos many times, and then I can't turn off autoplay on those sites anymore. I don't want Edge to decide which sites can and which can't autoplay. I want autoplay to be disabled unless I manually enable it.
@MissyQ Are there any plans to add the option to block/disable autoplay rather than just limit it, as in Edge Legacy? The "Limit" option is not sufficient because it decides to enable autoplay for sites where I manually play videos many times, which is not what I want. I don't want Edge to decide when it should enable autoplay; I want it to be disabled unless I enable it manually.
Also, I think your approach of considering issues addressed when you see a drop in incoming feedback is flawed. Why would you assume that people are happy if they don't resubmit the same feedback over and over? I only submit feedback about each issue once. I guess I should start submitting it many times until it's resolved.
It's working for me without removing Edge. There are multiple entries you have to change in the Settings/apps/Default Apps. If an app/program opens Edge instead of Edge Dev, type the extension Eg. HTML at the top of the page in the "set a default for a file type or link type'' field, then change the default for that file type to Edge Dev. Then if you click on Microsoft Edge Dev in the list, you can see all the file types associated with Edge Dev. I have 19 entries assigned to Edge Dev. Change the major ones first HTML HTM HTTP HTTPS, because they can change multiple file types just by changing one of the major ones. Hope this helps. If you have an questions, let me know.
The new version of Edge that went live on Linux for the dev version has broken most websites, so far the only website that works, is NewEgg, Amazon, Wattpad, and Youtube. The website just crashes with this: Error Code SIGILL
Seria muy productivo que desarrollen una opción para que se traduzcan las palabras que uno mismo selecciona en ingles al castellano y viceversa de un documento PDF en ingles, en mi caso soy hispanoparlante y leo muchos papers científicos y tengo que abrir muchas ventanas de google traslate para buscar palabras, si desde el mismo pdf se agrega una opción rápida donde al seleccionar una palabra en vista rápida se agregue una opción de traducción como resaltar, definir o agregar comentario seria excelente @MissyQ
i just installed 95.0.1020.30 and noticed larger fonts on the bookmarks that do not fit on the standard view plus all Edge's menus - they look a bit "too big" as if it's zoomed in 120% or something.
also the bookmarks that don't fit on the main screen became, a bit huge and that's a bit odd - perhaps a toggle to adjust the zoom level would be the best way to go? so users that need/want bigger fonts can adjust to their liking? thank you
There is a BLOCK option however it is experimental and needs to be enabled via the edge://flags area and look for "Show block option in autoplay settings". This then adds the BLOCK option to the Media Autoplay setting however I still have some web site playing unwanted videos so I suspect it is still being worked on.
Thanks for the note. I used the Block option, behind the edge://flags, for a while, but it didn't seem to do much, if any, better than Limit.
I hope the team has reconsidered marking this as Addressed at the end of this week and will continue to work on allowing a setting to prevent autoplay of video and audio as this was the feature request.
