Try the revamped Touch Bar experience on Microsoft Edge on Mac

Microsoft

Hope you are all enjoying the latest version of Microsoft Edge (download here). Over the past few months, our team has been reading through and understanding the feedback we have received especially for the Touch Bar on Macs.

 

We feel that we understand the feedback and have made changes to address many of them. You can check out the latest Touch Bar experience on your Macs in the latest Canary and Developer builds.

 

Top feedback

Tab scrubber - The tab scrubber lets you skim through all your open tabs easily. You can see the tab favicons on your Touch Bar and can quickly browse through them and stop on the one you want to work on. Below are the improvements that we have made

  1. Predictive text during scrubbing- A lot of you told us that while scrubbing through the open tabs, if you encountered a website that has an active cursor, the touchbar transformed to suggestive typing and it was painful to get back to the tab scrubbing experience. We have improved that experience by suppressing the suggestive typing until the user starts typing.Touchbar_suggestive typing .gif
  2. Color of the backplates- A lot of favicons were hard to see on the Touch Bar as they merged with the background. We have changed the color of the backplate to work well with most favicons.

Media scrubber - We made a few changes to the media scrubber as we received a bunch of feedback on this, considering it is the most used Touch Bar functionality.

  1. Background layout- Previously the media scrubber was often confused with the volume one as they looked very similar. We changed the look of the background and knob of the scrubber to make the experience more “media-like”.Media scrubber 1.gif
  2. Time stamp- Now during scrubbing you will see a time stamp on the media scrubber in real time that gives an indication of how far you have scrubbed through the video.media_scrubber 2.gif
  3. Time elapsed and remaining in full screen mode- We have added a functionality in full screen mode so now you can see the ‘time elapsed’ and ‘time remaining’ move dynamically as you scrub through the video.

Right-to-Left (RTL) language support - We have extended support to the RTL languages like Arabic, Hebrew etc on the touchbar.

 Touchbar_RTL.gif

 

What’s next

We are not done with the improvements we have planned for the Touch Bar.  In the coming releases we plan to make the following changes:

  1. Picture-in-Picture (PIP) support - We are planning to add the PIP support on the Touch Bar to make it easier to watch videos while you are multi-tasking on the web.
  2. Web dev tools - We are investigating the best way to add developer tools to the Touch Bar. We want to make it easy for you to pull up the most used actions and tools during web development.

 

We’re listening

We love getting feedback and delivering experiences that meet all of the needs of our customers on Microsoft Edge. Please give the revamped Touch Bar experience a try and reach out to us with your feedback by joining the discussion below or by choosing the Send feedback option in Microsoft Edge.

20 Replies
add themes from chrome web store

Hi @bigboymoo 

 

Didn't really get this. What exactly is the ask?

Hi,
he is asking for support for Google chrome themes to be added to the new Microsoft Edge
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/themes

Thanks @HotCakeX. Please try it out and provide your feedback on the experience. 

Thanks for the clarification @HotCakeX. I'll be sure to provide this feedback to the right partner team and get back on the timeline if it is already planned. 

Hi,
anytime and thank you :)

@Elliot Kirk This great! This could be used for the Surface Neo in 2020 for it's touchbar-like feature.

 

Thanks @pbilk. That's a great idea.

The Neo team is working on many such scenarios on how to best leverage the dual screen infra. We will surely share our work with them as well and pass on your feedback :)

@Elliot KirkI'd like to inform you that (it's very likely that your team already know this), please implement DRM for Netflix completely before Edge insider went release.

Currently, by pushing ctrl+alt+shift+D or ctrl+alt+shift+Q, you can see the bitrate of your playing video.

 

For Edge and Netflix metro app, it will be 1080p and video bitrate somewhere between 2500~8000. However, for Firefox, Chrome, and Edge insider, although it STILL CAN BE 1080p, the bitrate is anywhere from 900-2000 - abysmal, and not watchable.

 

Since Edge insider with chromium engine will be replacing Edge soon, please solve this (I know it's mid-low priority) before its release - or we won't have any possible way to "watch Netflix with highest bitrate possible AND be able to adjust speed(by tweaking DOM object document.querySelector('video')) on Windows PC."

 

Thank you, opensource and Microsoft rocks.

Thanks @Jerry_Ho. Will make sure your feedback reaches out to the relevant team and will get back once we hear back from them. 

@bigboymoo @HotCakeX - So we heard back from the partner team. Installation of the Chrome theming extension will be supported starting Edge 81 (behind a flag). At the same time, they have started work on built-in theming options in Edge but that will take some time to concretize the plans. 

 

@aditya10 


@aditya10 wrote:

@bigboymoo @HotCakeX - So we heard back from the partner team. Installation of the Chrome theming extension will be supported starting Edge 81 (behind a flag). At the same time, they have started work on built-in theming options in Edge but that will take some time to concretize the plans. 

 


 

Thank you, that's awesome!

would you please mention which flag I need to enable to be able to use theme extensions?

I've been on version 81 (canary) for 3 weeks now and can't find an appropriate flag that fits the description

@Elliot Kirk 

 

Hey,

 

I have two queries:

 

1. May I ask if Microsoft is contributing to the Chromium developer tools?  I see Firefox have added interactive tools in the developer area to help people use features such as CSS Grid and flexbox. Are these features likely to be added here?

 

2. Is there a status update on level 2 of the CSS Grid specs? It looks to have stalled on the Chromium bug tracker and I really feel like level 2 support really needs to come along soon.

 

Thanks,

Neil

Hi @rctneil

Thanks for reaching out. Yes, Microsoft is actively contributing to the dev tools. The number of commits so far is over 300. We've contributed major accessibility fixes to the DevTools as well as 3D view tool that we're experimenting with, with loads more to come. 
Not so sure about the FF interactive tools but have made sure to pass on the feedback to the right team and they will look into it. 

Let me get back on #2 as soon as I hear back from the team. 

Hi @HotCakeX, can you check this flag out 'msAllowThemeInstallationFromChromeStore' and let me know if it works? 

@aditya10 


@aditya10 wrote:

Hi @HotCakeX, can you check this flag out 'msAllowThemeInstallationFromChromeStore' and let me know if it works? 


Hi,

sorry but I can't seem to find that flag

 

gfdgfd.png

 

Or maybe you meant to add it to the Target of Edge shortcut like this?

"--msAllowThemeInstallationFromChromeStore"

 

i also tried that but Themes from Chrome webs store still wouldn't install.

 

Emoji support on Touch Bar would make experience a whole lot better. @Elliot Kirk 

It's funny that the biggest competitor of MacOS has the best MacOS support (excluding Safari)