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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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”.
- 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.
- 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.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
