An angry rant about snapping windows to the sides of the screen

[WolfIcefang]

I had already written this and sent it through the Send Feedback tool, but it feels more at home on the forum since it's more "my opinion" than "this is a bug".

When pulling a tab off of a maximized Edge (can) window, the newly created window will always also be maximized. This is a great default, but if I am dragging the tab to an edge of the screen, I want the new window to resize itself to that side of the screen. Let me explain why: There are two potential reasons why you would want to create a new window out of an existing tab. Reason number one is to compare two web pages side-by-side. Theoretically, the fastest way to do this is to grab a tab and drag it to an edge, which should activate Window 10's (awesome) window pairing UI on the empty edge of the screen. However, the tab's new window automatically maximizes itself, so this is not possible. The second reason is because you want to have one group of tabs in one window, and another group of tabs in another window. Once you are done organizing your tabs, you would only need to see one at a time, so it might seem reasonable to auto-maximize tabs. This flawed assumption would be wrong. Let's say you have Tabs A, B, C, and D. You want tabs A and B to stay in the original window, and want to move tabs C and D into a new window. First, you drag window D out from the original window and let go of it in about the middle of the screen. Unfortunately for you, tab D's new window maximizes, which means tab C is now hidden behind tab D. Now, you must think carefully about your next step. If you simply bring the window holding tabs A, B, and C to the foreground, with a gesture, alt+tab, or use of the mouse, you will have no way to drag and drop tab C into tab D's window since window A B is now maximized over window D. So it is necessary to restore down window D, not minimize it, then grab C and drag it over to D and put it into place.

Maybe you didn't read all of that.
You shouldn't have needed to read all that.
If tabs pulled from existing windows were "restored down" instead of "maximized", or at least snapped to a side when brought to the edge of the screen, the complicated explanation I have written could have been summed up very quickly.

This is not a bug, since it works the same way in Chrome, but I do hope it can be improved.

[#2]

@WolfIcefang 

Hi!

I tried having Edge can maximized and with two tabs. Pulling away one tab and moving it to the edge of my screen made windows show the outline of a split screen window. Releasing the mouse button activated the split window feature. Releasing the tab in middle of windows does, as you say maximize, but dragging to the edge of the screen works for me the way you'd expect.

I'm running Edge can Version 78.0.249.0 and win 10 ent 1903

[#3]

I've encountered this behavior many times. I don't have google chrome currently installed but as far as i remember it has the same behavior so it might be a chromium thing.
I can't call it a problem because it's not. the way it is now takes only 2 clicks to put the pulled tab on the side. one click for removing it from the group and another for snapping it to the right or left. I don't know how much time it can save me if Microsoft made that change so i could do it with 1 click. maybe it will save me 0.5 seconds?
I think the wise thing would be to first attend to bigger problems and lacks of features the Edge insider has and after that make minor changes like this to the browser.

[#4]

You're totally right, and I should probably start paying more attention to the importance of my requests when sending feedback.

[#5]

@relnah 

That's very interesting, as the 1903 feature update for Windows 10 hasn't been forced upon me quite yet. Maybe that's what I need to get for it to work?