Has the Edge team forgotten that touch screens exist?

[martinnn]

Chromium Edge is completely lacking in touchscreen support and I have seen no mentions of them planning to add any in. Legacy Edge was much better for touch screens. I find it odd, to say the least, that Edge now lacks touch support considering that Microsoft sells tablets.

Among the issues:

• Touching and holding doesn't show the square that indicates a right-click. How long is long enough to trigger a right click? You'll just have to guess and hope.
• Touching and holding a button on the toolbar has the exact opposite problem. The square appears, but it doesn't disappear after you stop touching the screen.
• Inability to reorder favorites bar items with touch
• Inability to reorder extensions on the menu bar with touch
• You can't select text (with touch) without triggering a right click. It's also different from the rest of Windows, where a single tap selects text.
• Autofill items have a delete button, but only on hover. You can't easily use a touchscreen to press that button without knowing the location of that button beforehand.
• Collections lacks touch support (otherwise a great feature)
  • Inability to drag text or images into collections
  • Collections and collection items have a selection box, but only on hover. You can't easily use a touchscreen to press that box without knowing the location of that box beforehand.
  • This is a much less important thing, but there's no rubber-banding effect when scrolling in Collections.

[#2]

Hello!
I suggest you make suggestions directly to the MS Edge development team by clicking the feedback button in the upper right corner. I'm sure they'll see it!
I wish you a happy life and good health!

[#3]

Thanks @martinnn that you bring this back to attention, thought I'm the only one who misses these features. I reported most of your points to the developer team almost half a year ago, but somehow lost hope that they'll fix it in the near future. Well, at least sorting favs in the favourites manager and invoking the touch keyboard with finger and pen finally works now. 

May I add a few additional items to your list: 

• Text selection is very uncommon (tap and hold instead of single touch) and extremely unstable. I often can't select anything anymore or the whole page freezes when working with text selection, especially when the page is accidentially zoomed. 
• On larger text inputs the whole inputsection doesn't move up when you click into a lower section (eg GMX mail interface) , so the cursor is halfway or completely hidden by the virtual keyboard and you have to scroll manually or type blind. 
• The fullscreen dropdown of the the tab- and addressbar (edge://flags/#edge-enable-shy-ui) doesn't show when swiping in with the finger, only with pen or mouse. This makes fullscreen-mode completely useless for touch users. And even worse, it is extremely unstable and freezes the whole browser almost every time you click on a tab. 

Well, I'm pretty curious if we'll see some improvements on that soon, keeping in mind that now more than 30% of Windows-based devices are tablets or touch-enabled convertibles. Edge will not be a success with that lack of touch optimization. 

Best regards

[#4]

@martinnn 

I agree with everything you wrote, and I would like to add that instead of making tabs ever narrower as more tabs are opened, the tab bar should become scrollable at some point, as in Edge Legacy, so that the tabs are not too narrow to select with a finger. The persistent preview of all tabs that would open when selecting an arrow to the right of the new tab is also very useful for use on touchscreens.

I would love to be able to set up Edge so that when Windows enters tablet mode, Edge goes to full-screen mode, with the tabs and address bar appearing when swiping from the top of the screen, with tab previews always on. This would provide a similar experience to Internet Explorer on Windows 8, which was great on tablets.

I also think the animation shown when swiping across the page from left to right to go back was much better in Edge Legacy, with the whole page moving, and it was easier to flick the page to go back; in Chromium Edge I have to swipe further to go back.

[#5]

Is anyone else also having issues with the window control box (minimize, maximize, close) simply not responding at all when using touch?
(I am on v 85.0.564.51)

[#6]

After almost 2 years, same issues are still there. It's even impossible to move tabs between windows, using touch. This is crazy.

[#7]

You call it crazy as if you expected the Edge team to be competent lol

[#8]

Edge used to be good for touch. They're just not committing, it's sad. Lol
Performance isn't bad, but c'mon, I'm a surface user and there is no good touch browser anymore? It's kinda nonsense

[#9]

You can upvote and comment here too: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/0127b490-d138-ec11-a81a-6045bd7bfdf4

[#10]

Done, and I also reporter some more issues

[#11]

A new low-point: the shortcut-buttons in the "New tab"-page (which can also show Bing news) are now movable, and instead of pressing/clicking these buttons, you instead initiate a move when trying to press them using touch.