Mar 16 2021 01:04 PM
Hi everyone, hope you are doing well!
I am a part of this community since a long time, starting from the very first day, when Edge Canary was released for Windows 10. I am proud to be a part of the incredible journey with the team, shaping the product development through opinions and feedback.
I am very fond of communities, specially any community related to Microsoft products. I thought to boost the community here using a new initiative: Community Introductions!
The idea behind this thread is for the Microsoft employees on the Edge team and the fellow insiders to introduce themselves and share what they love about Microsoft Edge, what impact have they made in their communities, anything you want to share. Let's build a bright community here!
If you love the idea, please like this post so that we can have more threads like these in future. And yes, do not forget to share your feedback with the team using the Feedback Tool!
Note: The thread will be moderated and any inappropriate comment will be removed. Please read the newly put up Community Guidelines here: https://aka.ms/EdgeCommunityGuidelines.
Mar 16 2021 01:17 PM - edited Mar 16 2021 01:23 PM
I will begin with my own introduction here.
A bit about me: I am Rohit Yadav, a proud Edge insider from India and a Microsoft fanboy! I am a student pursuing education in Computer Sciences and have been associated with Microsoft technologies throughout my schooling and higher education. I am a Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador, building and boosting communities. I was also featured in the Edge Insider Spotlight campaign, which is available here: Meet Rohit Yadav: Microsoft Edge Insider Spotlight (YouTube). I am deeply inspired by Microsoft's mission: "We are on a mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more."
What I love about Microsoft Edge: Everything! I love the new Microsoft Edge and it is very hard for me to pick one feature. Still the feature I would highlight here is Vertical Tabs. It is a game changer, isn't it?
I have impacted my community and got a huge number of people to switch to the new Edge. They love it and their reaction has been positive.
I am open for connections on:
Twitter: Rohit Yadav (Twitter)
LinkedIn: Rohit Yadav (LinkedIn)
Website(Under development): https://rohityadav.live
Looking forward to hearing your stories!
Mar 17 2021 10:11 AM - edited Mar 17 2021 11:10 AM
Hi @Rohit Yadav , this is Himanshu Singh
About me - I am a 1st year electrical & electronics engineering student at National Institute of technology, Jamshedpur, India. I see my self as a skill development enthusiast with interest in web development and graphics designing. I am an eager MS Edge insider and I connect soulfully with Microsoft's well organized softwares.
How I came across this - Well, I was casually browsing Edge's insider website to check on the browser's upcoming features, where I saw your video in the spotlight section. It was really nice to see you as such an enthusiastic student ambassador. The level of your loyalty towards Microsoft really fascinated me and it was something that I connected to. Also the fact that you were from India kept me eager. Since then I tried to keep in touch with your handles and kept checking on your posts. And as a result of which I found this community thread on your twitter.
New update on Edge- This time Edge got some huge changes. The vertical tabs feature, updates in the pdf viewer, syncing open tabs etc. The feature which most fascinated me was the improvements to pdf annotator. I am student and in these online semesters the online & easy to use tools for studying on your laptop and doing your assignment has developed great importance. So the improvements in the pdf viewer are the quick menu that pops up immediately after selecting the text, improvements on pen's smoothness, text search feature and the sweet 2 page view feature.
Since long I have been a huge fan of Microsoft's pen in these annotators. Its so so soo smooth that it just feels like gliding my pen on the digital pad when I write on pdfs. The ink is colorful and soft yet bold enough to make an impact. And with this the quick menu pop up, it just increases your productivity and ink change time. The text search feature is another cherry on the top.
Now talking about the other features. The vertical tabs view comes out to be the most in the spotlight. When I tried this feature on the Edge Dev I doubted if they will continue with this. But they eventually did and I think the thought process behind this addon is to enable swift browsing and to increase the user's productivity. The feature is doing this job really good. It does decrease the time to switch tabs and it places all your tabs in a better glance.
What I am looking upto- The feature I am looking out the most is the write on web feature which allowed us to make notes directly on the webpages. I felt to be a revolutionary feature when it first came out in 2016. But due to some reason MS discontinued it and I don't know why. Now we have the web capture feature as its substitute but it just not gives the feels. Write on web was too easy to use, dynamic and accessible. I wrote a feedback to MS asking them to please bring it back. Hope they would look into it 🙂
Closing words - With so much already said I would just lastly say that,
Despite all that, Microsoft, I am in love with your simplicity. A wise man said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" This applies to you so well ! The simple and organized UI hiding underneath an array of dynamic features to empower its users.
Thanks @Rohit Yadav for being such an active insider. I guess it was your love for Microsoft and emphatic energy that attracted me to the community. Lets make this world a better place together !
Open for connections -
Mar 17 2021 01:04 PM
Mar 17 2021 02:30 PM
Thank you so much for kicking this off, @Rohit Yadav. This is amazing, and I'm so excited to introduce myself to everyone, if they don't already know me! 😄
About me:
I've floated around the Microsoft ecosystem over on the Xbox and Bing teams for roughly 7 years before coming onto the Edge team at the end of 2019. I'm an avid console gamer (bet you can't tell which one), absolutely obsessed with Overwatch (Mercy main!), and I'm a mermaid irl. Okay, maybe not really, but I am absolutely a fairy. 😉 My favorite animal is a family of animals, cephalopods, I'm a HUGE space nerd, and I thrive on making people laugh. I'm married to a wonderful man who stays at home with my (currently) almost 7 year old son, have an orange tabby named Jack (he's not that bright), and a white German Shepherd named Pearl (who is overly protective of the family). I'm also a huge advocate for mental health, and am very open to talking about my own diagnoses.
What I do on the Edge team:
I'm the Community Manager for the team! I also handle communications that come from the team in the form of Top Feedback, the update tiles for the Dev and Beta channels, and the tweets that come from MSEdgeDev. I coordinate your feedback from social media (Twitter and Reddit) and ensure that the team is aware of what y'all are reporting to us outside of the browser. I have counterparts who help out with our internal Insiders (Josh) and here on the Insider forums and Answers forums (Alex). Alex also helps me out on Reddit.
What I love about Microsoft Edge:
COLLECTIONS. You will see me yell from the rooftops whenever someone asks about what makes Edge stand out from other browsers. I love Collections so much, and use them heavily for my daily work life. Add all tabs to new collection and then Send to Excel makes my life so much easier, it seriously improves my productivity. I'm a walking advertisement for the feature. 😄 But I also recently fell in love with vertical tabs. People either love them or hate them, but after a learning period of retraining my brain to go left rather than up for my tabs, I am a fan.
Missy Quarry (she/her/hers)
Community Manager - Microsoft Edge
Mar 17 2021 02:40 PM
Hey there everyone!
About me - I've worked on a few different teams around Microsoft (shoutout to AzureSupport and M365) before coming to the Edge team. I graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Informatics. In my free time I play a lot of video games, play and run a few tabletop games, and craft up a storm (crochet and cross stitch are my current faves.) I have a very cute cat named Nicolette and I absolutely love hedgehogs, though I don't currently have one. I'm engaged to the sweetest nerd in the world, who also works at Microsoft. My passion project is empowering Women in Tech and I've volunteered several summers to teaching coding and robotics bootcamps for girls in elementary and middle school.
What I do on the Edge team - I'm a Microsoft Edge Community Manager, which you probably already know! I primarily focus on AMC (answers.microsoft.com), a lot of you are Volunteer Moderators over there as well so you know I also participate heavily on our VM connect forum! Beyond that, I'm also here on TechCommunity and I'm Missy's backup over on Reddit. The majority of my time goes directly to these communities and to raising issues to our feature teams to investigate and making sure your voices are heard.
What I love about Microsoft Edge - The Community! Seriously, you guys are incredible. The browser is richer for each of your contributions here and in our other spaces. Feature wise, my favorite is Collections. I use them for everything and I have way too many, or possibly not enough - depends how you look at it. Can you tell our in-house Collections evangelist trained me? 😉
Thanks @Rohit Yadav for starting this thread and encouraging the community to get to know one another a little better! I'm looking forward to reading these introductions! 😃
Mar 17 2021 06:57 PM
Well, since you asked, hi, I'm Josh! Microsoft was actually my very first job out of college, and I've been on the browser team the whole time, although I did have a few internships here as well during college, which was back in the IE days. I got both of my degrees from Ohio State, although I don't use them too much right now Officially I'm a community manager, although I also help craft the contents of the tiles on the update welcome page, as well as do a lot of support and testing internal to the company. Prior to doing this I did a stint as a data analyst, and before that I was an official tester, all while staying on the same team!
Outside of work, I'm a big old nerd, between being a music nerd singing in choirs or writing music, a video game nerd hacking consoles and speedrunning retro game randomizers, or a puzzle nerd writing puzzles for the various puzzle competitions we have at the company. I'm also a big animal lover, although I only have cats right now since I just bought a house and before, when I was living in an apartment, didn't want to have a dog without also having a yard (which I now do!) I'm also learning that home maintenance is a hobby in and of itself, and am hoping to take advantage of the spring to get outside and plant some stuff.
Keeping in mind that I've been an Edge user for a long time, I'd say my newest favorite thing is the combination of vertical tabs and tab groups. It's seriously a game changer for me. I was super disappointed when we moved away from Edge Legacy specifically because of how well it handled lots of tabs, but this I think is even better. I'm also a big fan of extensions, and tend to run more extensions that I've written than I get from the store! For example, I wrote a favorites menu extension to emulate Edge Legacy's long before we added that into new Edge natively. I also like using sites like Teams in a PWA window, and extensions can apply to those as well, tweaking their behavior to be even better than the full application.
Mar 18 2021 02:18 AM
I am loving the introductions! So much inspirational stories to read!
Josh you are so lucky to get into Microsoft in the first job itself! I am a Student Ambassador right now and working with the teams at Microsoft has made me learn so many things about the Microsoft culture. I am about to complete my graduation, and will be on constant lookout for roles in Microsoft! It will be my dream come true if I get to work with this amazing Edge team