May 12 2020 04:50 PM
Hi,
Thank you all for the insightful discussion about your use cases of the Legacy Microsoft Edge's Tab Set Aside feature and confirmation prompt when closing a browser window.
In that thread, some of you have mentioned how seamlessly Collections could work with the Legacy Microsoft Edge's Tab Set Aside feature while others see these features as having distinct use cases.
We continue to explore how we can improve existing features and their integration with one another to help you pick up where you left off with your browsing.
To get a better understanding of your scenarios, I have a few questions I'd like to ask:
What do you think about the Recently closed tabs experience?
Do you use the "Continue where you left" setting (edge://settings/onStartup) which automatically restores the tabs from your last active browser window on browser restart? Why or why not?
How do your use cases differ amongst Tab Set Aside, Collections, and Recently closed tabs?
Regarding some of your specific feedback:
Thanks,
Kofi from the Edge Localization, Collections, and History teams
May 12 2020 09:43 PM
Answers to Questions
What do you think about the Recently closed tabs experience?
Do you use the "Continue where you left" setting (edge://settings/onStartup) which automatically restores the tabs from your last active browser window on browser restart? Why or why not?
How do your use cases differ amongst Tab Set Aside, Collections, and Recently closed tabs?
Set Tabs Aside Use Cases:
As a DevOps Engineer, I am constantly searching Google/Bing for how to do something in PowerShell, C#, or other language. I find multiple examples of what may or may not work. This brings me to 5-7 related tabs plus the search tab. Quite often, I have to stop and come back to this work. I Set Tabs Aside to put that research into a grouped session. Now I have a clean browser to work on a different task. I may or may not come back to this for a few weeks. When I do, I click to return all the tabs and pick up where I left off. The tabs that provide the most useful information, I send the article to OneNote for permanent reference with link and data intact.
As an IT user, I often start reading a Wiki to learn a new topic. I click on 5-7 different links and start reading. Sometimes, I have actions to take such as figuring out how to do this install or get access to all that I need. As this is something I do partially through the day and have other tasks to complete, I will Set Tabs Aside so that I can pick back up later and have a clean browser to work on the next task.
As a user, I go through headlines on a site and open up several tabs of what I would like to read. Some are longer than I want to read at the moment. I go to next tab and read it's story. This can lead to 50 tabs open and reading maybe 45 of them at a time. I don't want to lose the others, so I Set Tabs Aside and close everything down. I do something else for a bit, watching tv, gaming, life. I may come back and read the latest news. Maybe a day later, or weeks later, I will pick up where I left off on the larger articles and restore those tabs and then close them when I'm done.
In all of these scenarios, I am wanting to group a set of tabs together to triage/review/read later. The goal is get them out of the way so I can have a clutter free browsing experience for other tasks. When I'm ready, I restore them to continue working towards closing them. This is why they are not Favorites. Favorites are intended to be revisited over and over again. For example, going to TechCommunity for regular consumption. Collections is close, but it is keeping my tabs when I add to them and not removing the temporary session when I open them. I need the same behavior of Set Tabs Aside which allows me to group these tabs into a session and close the other tabs. When I restore them, I need the Collection to go away. If I need to save them again, I will set them aside with what is left.
May 12 2020 10:49 PM - edited May 13 2020 04:28 PM
1. How many groups of tabs did you have set aside in the Legacy Microsoft Edge?
2. How long did you typically keep these groups of set aside tabs?
3. Are you aware of or have you used the Recently closed tabs experience which is accessible in the More menu (…) and in the full page History experience (Edge 83 Canary/Dev/Beta)?
What do you think about the Recently closed tabs experience?
4. Do you use the "Continue where you left" setting (edge://settings/onStartup) which automatically restores the tabs from your last active browser window on browser restart? Why or why not?
Yes, I use it all the time, why?
5. How do your use cases differ amongst Tab Set Aside, Collections, and Recently closed tabs?
Tab set aside:
Collections:
Recently closed tabs:
Note:
May 13 2020 02:46 AM - edited May 13 2020 02:55 AM
1. How many groups of tabs did you have set aside in the Legacy Microsoft Edge?
Depend on the project that I'm working on. Most busy days up to 50.
2. How long did you typically keep these groups of set aside tabs?
Unless I will return to them or I will forgot the group exists. Usually normal time is a few hours (20%)/ few days (30%) / few months (10%) / never (40%). Sometimes I do not want to restore all tabs, but I would like to only add one or more pages to tabs aside.
3. Are you aware of or have you used the Recently closed tabs experience which is accessible in the More menu (…) and in the full page History experience (Edge 83 Canary/Dev/Beta)
3a. Does not store it between PC was turned down and is not synced. I have to keep the browser session between different classes at university (9 subjects each semester). I return to those sessions when I need. It is required for me. It takes too much time to organize (store and reopen saved links from collections). I and my friends at faculty stick to use legacy Edge.
3b. What do you think about the Recently closed tabs experience?
It is good only for tabs(one or entire set) accidently closed. It can not be trusted that tabs will not be overridden by opening limit (you store limited amount of tabs). I open up to 30 tabs from one web search results. How you think opening and closing tabs would mess up the recently closed tabs list?
4. Do you use the "Continue where you left" setting (edge://settings/onStartup) which automatically restores the tabs from your last active browser window on browser restart? Why or why not?
It would work when I have only one subject at the semester at the same point or create separate Edge profiles for each subject. It is crazy to do so. Also switching between many profiles need to configure all settings etc.... You should think about tabs aside like "a browser clipboard for the tabs"
5. How do your use cases differ amongst Tab Set Aside, Collections, and Recently closed tabs?
Tabs aside, to store current state of work, when you need to pick it up. Ex you work on the research for your project for given subject at university, but lecture ends and you need to start new browser and go on with next subject. When you get home you have state of your work from different lectures. (snapshot of your work to continue later). Mozilla Firefox had in the past possibility to keep all opened sessions and reopen them later, but idea was badly realized. There was not preview of the tabs stored in the session and comparison which session you want to open. It was not possible to merge tabs stored in session with current session. All that problems were solved in the Tabs aside function. It is easy to use thanks to button located in tabs bar. It is easy to compare different tabs aside(s) thanks to panel view. It will be much more complex to compare sets of tabs stored in collections. The view created for tabs aside is a breakthrough.
Collections - when you work on something structured (master thesis, shoping for Christmas) and you have time to take notes and organize your stored tabs (draft work).
Recently closed tabs - backup if you closed some page that you had open just 5 min ago to get it back. The browser history is a good place to get it too. But the recently closed tabs is quicker to access. (backup plan).
May 13 2020 11:10 AM
(snapshot of your work to continue later).
I like this phrasing. We want a snapshot of the tabs and browsing history of that window to continue our work later.
From a UI perspective, Set Tabs Aside is much better for showing you at-a-glance details than Collections. Collections shows the tab previews with no details until you click on it. Then, you get a list of tabs. Set Tabs Aside, you get bigger tab previews and the page title at the bottom of the tab. This gives far more context to what tabs are part of the group. It also has horizontal scrolling so you can see more tabs. These 2 features make it much easier to quickly go through groups to find a tab session you want to restore. These features should be added to Collections to make it easier to browse and see what is inside Collections while keeping the detail list view when clicking on a collections.
May 13 2020 12:59 PM
What do you think about the Recently closed tabs experience?
Do you use the "Continue where you left" setting (edge://settings/onStartup) which automatically restores the tabs from your last active browser window on browser restart? Why or why not?
How do your use cases differ amongst Tab Set Aside, Collections, and Recently closed tabs?
See above for recently closed (useful for accidentally closed tabs); tab set aside was great for "context switching" because all the tabs went away and then stayed in the side drawer until you restored them; collections are more of a glorified favorites list (in fact I rarely use favorites at all); I have ten collections right now, each named for a theme, and I add notes to specific items to remind me of where I was or next steps to take -- I really miss the transient nature of tab set aside!
May 13 2020 09:15 PM - edited May 14 2020 09:41 PM
What do you think about the Recently closed tabs experience? It is good and does what it says.
Do you use the "Continue where you left" setting (edge://settings/onStartup) which automatically restores the tabs from your last active browser window on browser restart? Why or why not? No, I don't. I prefer a fresh window whenever I open the browser. If I want to continue with what I was doing earlier, I can easily use the Recently closed tabs feature.
How do your use cases differ amongst Tab Set Aside, Collections, and Recently closed tabs?
I feel that an important difference is that Tab Set Aside is much faster and easier to continue with. For example, I am casually surfing on the web. I find many interesting news articles and open all of them in different tabs. i suddenly realise that I have to do research on a project. So, I set aside these news article tabs and get a fresh browser window. Later on, I can restore these tabs. I don't need to store them permanently. So, after I have restored them, they no longer remain stored in the browser. When I close the tabs after reading the news articles, I will probably not need them again. So, Set Aside Tabs is temporary storage of tabs.
While doing research, I want reliable information that I am going to store for a long period of time. So, I will add my tabs to a new collection so that I don't lose them and I can access them whenever I need them.
In my opinion, the collections feature is better in the sense that it is more organised and has quite a few useful tools. However, when I send all my tabs to a new collection, the tabs still remain on the Window. So, now, again, I have to right click and close all tabs.
Similarly, in Edge legacy, when I restore all tabs, then they are removed from the list. In the case of collections, however, the tabs still remain in the collection.
So, I strongly believe that the new Edge should have a Tab Set Aside just like the previous Edge. These features should co-exist, each having their own use cases.
Also, in the "Tabs you have set aside" list, there should be an option that can send all those tabs to a new collection in case the user wants to store them more permanently in a categorised manner.
May 14 2020 05:50 AM
May 14 2020 11:55 AM
May 15 2020 07:49 AM
Really history and favourites should be able to handle this task. The scenario my family encounter is where they don't close tabs when they have finished with them. This leaves them with maybe 40 tabs open and no idea what they are. History doesn't work terribly well and it is sometimes impossible to find pages for some reason. If the history recorded check points such as all the tabs open when the user stopped using the browser they would be able to go back and could safely close the entire lot.
We keep getting new ways of reinventing the same functionality such as the reading list, but I feel they divert attention away from improving the originals.
May 20 2020 12:40 PM
What do you think about the Recently closed tabs experience?
Do you use the "Continue where you left" setting (edge://settings/onStartup) which automatically restores the tabs from your last active browser window on browser restart? Why or why not?
How do your use cases differ amongst Tab Set Aside, Collections, and Recently closed tabs?
May 20 2020 02:42 PM
Recently closed is very useful, but I wouldn't have expected to find the list in history. Perhaps a more on the primary list of 5 recent tabs would be more intuitive.
I always use continue where I left off.
I've never used set aside tabs or collections. Both appear to replicate favourites.
May 20 2020 03:23 PM
May 22 2020 03:49 AM
Hello there, just wanted to answer about the "Set Aside Tab" thing that was on Legacy, and wanted to bring it back (hopefully) to new Edge. Well these are some of my answer regards to this questions.
Well, i hope you guys know what i want to say for this. I know you guys doing a tremendous job about this browser and it's impact for all the people who using this browser. This browser has been day-to-day use for me since the windows 10 came out. So, here i am and maybe that's it actually. The only downside of the new Edge (for me, personally) is just there isn't the Set Tab Aside feature though.
May 24 2020 07:41 AM
I was update Microsoft Edge to new Chromium-based Edge. Unfortunately, I lost all my set aside tabs nothing in my Favorites & Other favorites folder. Can I do system restore and back to previous state?
Please advice any solution to recover?
May 24 2020 08:30 AM
May 24 2020 09:05 AM - edited May 24 2020 09:43 AM
But before i didn't sign in within Microsoft Edge.
May 24 2020 09:50 AM
May 25 2020 04:00 AM
May 26 2020 08:45 AM
@fgawinson I have a very similar problem where I saved like two months of research sources in favorites, now they're gone so if somebody from Microsoft could solve that, that would be kind of amazing.