Inking on Web Pages - Discussion

Microsoft

We have received a lot of feedback about supporting inking annotations for web pages like what we have in the current version of Microsoft Edge. Many users have told us that they use this functionality as a daily driver and would like to see it in the new version of Microsoft Edge as well. We would like to understand the scenarios in which you would use this functionality. Details about what you use it for, what are the expectations about availability of different tools, saving and sharing options etc. would be extremely useful in making sure we provide the best user experience to you. Your input will help us making sure that the feature works best for you. 

292 Replies

@Elliot Kirk I used all the features for web ink on the current version of Edge. It helped me highlight and underline webpages for some homework assignments. I didn't need to print out the paper because of the web inking abilities. I didn't use comments too much but I know it is a feature many people used. I liked that I could favorite my web notes or save them to OneNote. I also used the feature to quickly annotate something on a page to share with someone else over email or chat. I know that Snip & Sketch offers that ability but that app doesn't let you scroll up and down a web page and use ink on the page. That was a big advantage. I was very disappointed that inking was put on the backlog and is now being re-evaluated. If all of the web ink abilities from the current version of edge came to the new version of edge I would be extremely happy.

@HotCakeX Android was an excellent proof of concept and a terrible production implementation. The timeslice management is inappropriate for a portable device. The strategy introduced by Windows Phone and adopted by Apple is much better. Nevertheless, even on these systems, built-in software not implemented as an app is outside the law and can misbehave when inadequately tested.

 

The right solution is an RTOS with an app sandbox. Curiously, Microsoft just bought an RTOS, or the rights to use one (I'm not clear on that).

I would like to know more about timesslice management of Android and how it's bad. is there any links to articles or posts with more info?
what's Apple's strategy that's better exactly?
how can it be better than open source Android OS?

@IndustrialAutomation 

There is, now, sandboxing in Win10 Pro & enterprise ever since 1903.  It is enabled where or as shown... Check its box & hit OK.  Oh & Hyper-V virtualization must be enabled, also (That's in the BIOS). 

Sandbox.jpg

Cheers,
Drew

@HotCakeX It's not bad, it's inappropriate for a portable device. Android is a sort of JRE running on Linux.

Nitpickers will now interrupt with the news that it's not really a JRE. It is a runtime and the source code is Java, so as far as I'm concerned that makes it a Java Run-time Environment or JRE. No further correspondence will be entered into on this point, nitpickers of the world.

Back to the actual point: Linux provides process management. Linux supports concurrent processes. Android apps run in little sandboxes and the sandboxes run concurrently. The foreground app has the display but otherwise all apps are equal. This means a misbehaving app can hog the processor, or poll the GPS or the network even though the user isn't even aware it's still running.

 

By contrast Windows Phone and iOS apps are suspended as soon as they cease to be the foreground app. Apps that require periodic background activity can register a background process. Registration defines the amount of time required, the resources and how often it needs to run. When the app is suspended, the OS launches the background process on the required interval. If it completes and exits within its allotted time, all is well. If not, the OS sends it a warning message and it has one second to save state and exit before the OS terminates the process and reclaims associated resources. If the OS has to terminate a particular app's background process three times in a row, it is blacklisted and is not triggered again.

 

Some apps like music players appear to run continuously in background. The app is not running, an OS provided streaming service, playback or both are running and the app merely provides the user interface to launch it.

 

For Android, sandboxes notwithstanding, apps are essentially separate concurrent programs just like on a desktop system. This is fine for an eight core CPU with 16G of RAM and an 800W power supply. A fully charged phone battery would run that for about forty seconds. A thriftier approach is necessary especially if you want snappy UI.

@Elliot Kirk 

There's a lot of talk here about Microsoft in general, about Microsoft Edge Insider being worse than its classic counterpart, and about the need to be feature-identical at launch. (and... about Android?) 

 

I want to preface my response to your question by saying that I never used Inking on a daily basis; in fact, I've never used the feature at all beyond "seeing how it works". I'm not going to argue against it being added into the New Edge. It's one of the top pieces of feedback, and I can definitely see how it would be useful for people in lines of work other than mine. I can, however, talk about something remarkably similar to Add notes: Snip and Sketch. I use that tool multiple times a day, often to highlight graphical inconsistencies with Edge Canary that can't be captured with Send feedback's built in screenshot tools.

 

There are a lot of clever features in Add notes that I'd love to see in Snip and Sketch, and vice versa. I love that text notes are shown as bubbles with just a number, with the text displayed off to the side during an export. That would be a perfect addition to Snip and Sketch. It also turns out that I'm a huge fan of the clip functionality. Scrolling through the webpage while dragging a screenshot box? That's fantastic! There are definitely some things in Snip and Sketch which would greatly benefit the next Add Notes in Edge. Undo and Redo are always nice to have. A crop tool would be good for websites that don't work with Reading view. Zoom would be a great addition. Sure, multitouch zoom works in a pinch, but there's no "reset to actual size" button and if you use the keyboard to zoom in and out, good luck finding 100% again. There are of course the more pedestrian functions: Draw, Highlight, and Erase. Add notes can't live without them, even though I'm not able to aptly use them myself.

 

And let's talk about my "inability to use them" for a minute, shall we? Add Notes and Snip and Sketch are designed HEAVILY around pen based input. I don't own a Surface. I don't own a convertible laptop. Sure, I have a touch screen, but it isn't pen compatible. My primary form of input is a keyboard and mouse; I often use my laptop in a "docked" state. Add notes is nowhere near as bad as Snip and Sketch because it has the incredibly good text box tool that I never knew I needed, but the basic drawing is really, really bad. There are no shapes and no ways to draw a straight line. One would think that maybe there would be a dedicated tool, but no. Perhaps holding ctrl, shift, alt, or one of the other 102 keys on my keyboard would enable straight line mode? No! If I try to make an arrow or a box to indicate something's importance, it's going to look like a 5 year old with a coloring book. What about the highlighter? Well, it doesn't snap to text, so you're either going to use it carefully (slowly), or deal with another inaccurate squiggle. The eraser tool is fine, right? Sure, it's fine, but it's not great. You can't right click to erase. You can flip a surface pen over to use the eraser instantly (I'm only assuming because, again, I can't do that myself.), but you can't right click to get the same effect at the same speed. My mouse is special, it has back and and forwards buttons. Normally, these buttons would undo and redo actions. In Add notes, and also in Snip and Sketch, these awesome buttons do whatever the primary click button does. Why? Why do this? Right click doesn't do anything, which means you people had to decide to program this in! So yeah. Add notes is probably incredible with a Surface, but I don't have that. I could use Add notes if my line of work called for it, but I would constantly have the feeling that "this suite of tools isn't meant for MY computer." That's a really bad feeling to have.

 

I had planned on talking about the existing sharing options available in Add notes, but I don't use the tool myself, so let's move on to the third and final part of this text monolith:

 

Bugs.

Add notes in Classic Edge is really buggy. I have experimented with add notes for about an hour for the first time in over a year, and I've discovered that:

The back and forwards buttons will only mirror the action of the left mouse button after you've left clicked on the page at least once.

If you open and close Add notes on the New tab page, the page's loading circle will spin for 30 or more seconds. 

clipboard_image_1.png The new tab page isn't supposed to ever display a loading circle.

If you activate Add notes on a secondary display of comparatively lower resolution, a massive empty space will be included with your notes experience, free of charge.

Do you want fries with that?Do you want fries with that? This blank area is even included in exports.

Add notes takes a quick screenshot of the existing page when it's launched. There is an instant while the Add notes toolbar is initializing where you can drag and drop that screenshot instead of drawing on top of it.

Sometimes when you take a clip, it shows up in your clipboard as a blank gray square. I'm not posting it here because I fear it will break this post.

If you save or share your work, any ink already on the page will be converted into a png. Not only does this dramatically lower the quality of the ink by blurring the edges, but it makes the ink permanent - it can't be erased without closing and reopening Add notes.

 

Why am I making a laundry list bug report about software that may never be updated again? Because the Microsoft Edge team spent YEARS trying to fix these issues. Some people in this comment section are now expecting feature parity, without serious bugs, in two months. TWO MONTHS?!? That's not possible! Classic Edge's stability was, at least for me, legendarily awful. Yeah, I loved the favorites menu and the download manager and Cortana integration, but I often had to open up Chrome when submitting homework or doing anything that absolutely wasn't allowed to crash. I think we have made ourselves abundantly clear that Edge "is" everything detailed in this handy checklist: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge but more than anything we "need" a browser that won't self-destruct when we try to do basic things like drag tabs up above the address bar. (yes, that was a real, easy to reproduce bug on the stable version of Edge Classic that came with Windows 1803 or 1809, I don't remember which...) The Edge development team has been choosing their battles of what to focus on for launch in January; in my opinion, they've been choosing those battles very wisely. I would rather not have another glass mansion of unusable features, even if that means having only a solid foundation for now.

What does Sandbox has anything to do with Web page inking on Edge browser? just wondering
All the old features are welcome in the new browser, without them Edge is just one of the crowd.

@WolfIcefang 

Ctrl+0 (zero) will put Zoom, + or -, back to 100%.

Cheers,
Drew

@viniciusbezerra 

Exactly, Vini!... must have or keep what makes it special & especially likable because of its (unique) star pieces, we'll call them; those same features which, people have been mentioning since April.

Cheers,
Drew

@IndustrialAutomation 

Spoiler

@IndustrialAutomation wrote:

@HotCakeX It's not bad, it's inappropriate for a portable device. Android is a sort of JRE running on Linux.

Nitpickers will now interrupt with the news that it's not really a JRE. It is a runtime and the source code is Java, so as far as I'm concerned that makes it a Java Run-time Environment or JRE. No further correspondence will be entered into on this point, nitpickers of the world.

Back to the actual point: Linux provides process management. Linux supports concurrent processes. Android apps run in little sandboxes and the sandboxes run concurrently. The foreground app has the display but otherwise all apps are equal. This means a misbehaving app can hog the processor, or poll the GPS or the network even though the user isn't even aware it's still running.

 

By contrast Windows Phone and iOS apps are suspended as soon as they cease to be the foreground app. Apps that require periodic background activity can register a background process. Registration defines the amount of time required, the resources and how often it needs to run. When the app is suspended, the OS launches the background process on the required interval. If it completes and exits within its allotted time, all is well. If not, the OS sends it a warning message and it has one second to save state and exit before the OS terminates the process and reclaims associated resources. If the OS has to terminate a particular app's background process three times in a row, it is blacklisted and is not triggered again.

 

Some apps like music players appear to run continuously in background. The app is not running, an OS provided streaming service, playback or both are running and the app merely provides the user interface to launch it.

 

For Android, sandboxes notwithstanding, apps are essentially separate concurrent programs just like on a desktop system. This is fine for an eight core CPU with 16G of RAM and an 800W power supply. A fully charged phone battery would run that for about forty seconds. A thriftier approach is necessary especially if you want snappy UI.


so that could also be the reason why IOS devices always have lower amount of RAM and still perform the same as Android devices with higher RAMs? like IOS with 6GB RAM = Android with 12GB RAM in terms of performance.

 

also are all Android version like this? no significant improvements in Android 9 or 10?

 

we are getting there :) normal CPU cores for phones are now 8 cores with 8 GB RAM, highest one such as Note 10 plus and some others have 12GB RAM. very soon we will see 16GB phones and probably in the near future phones will have more RAM than PCs, well at least the Android ones.

phone screens getting bigger, RAM chips getting smaller and cheaper.

 

 

 

@viniciusbezerra 


@viniciusbezerra wrote:
All the old features are welcome in the new browser, without them Edge is just one of the crowd.

So true!

@WolfIcefang 

Spoiler

@WolfIcefang wrote:

@Elliot Kirk 

There's a lot of talk here about Microsoft in general, about Microsoft Edge Insider being worse than its classic counterpart, and about the need to be feature-identical at launch. (and... about Android?) 

 

I want to preface my response to your question by saying that I never used Inking on a daily basis; in fact, I've never used the feature at all beyond "seeing how it works". I'm not going to argue against it being added into the New Edge. It's one of the top pieces of feedback, and I can definitely see how it would be useful for people in lines of work other than mine. I can, however, talk about something remarkably similar to Add notes: Snip and Sketch. I use that tool multiple times a day, often to highlight graphical inconsistencies with Edge Canary that can't be captured with Send feedback's built in screenshot tools.

 

There are a lot of clever features in Add notes that I'd love to see in Snip and Sketch, and vice versa. I love that text notes are shown as bubbles with just a number, with the text displayed off to the side during an export. That would be a perfect addition to Snip and Sketch. It also turns out that I'm a huge fan of the clip functionality. Scrolling through the webpage while dragging a screenshot box? That's fantastic! There are definitely some things in Snip and Sketch which would greatly benefit the next Add Notes in Edge. Undo and Redo are always nice to have. A crop tool would be good for websites that don't work with Reading view. Zoom would be a great addition. Sure, multitouch zoom works in a pinch, but there's no "reset to actual size" button and if you use the keyboard to zoom in and out, good luck finding 100% again. There are of course the more pedestrian functions: Draw, Highlight, and Erase. Add notes can't live without them, even though I'm not able to aptly use them myself.

 

And let's talk about my "inability to use them" for a minute, shall we? Add Notes and Snip and Sketch are designed HEAVILY around pen based input. I don't own a Surface. I don't own a convertible laptop. Sure, I have a touch screen, but it isn't pen compatible. My primary form of input is a keyboard and mouse; I often use my laptop in a "docked" state. Add notes is nowhere near as bad as Snip and Sketch because it has the incredibly good text box tool that I never knew I needed, but the basic drawing is really, really bad. There are no shapes and no ways to draw a straight line. One would think that maybe there would be a dedicated tool, but no. Perhaps holding ctrl, shift, alt, or one of the other 102 keys on my keyboard would enable straight line mode? No! If I try to make an arrow or a box to indicate something's importance, it's going to look like a 5 year old with a coloring book. What about the highlighter? Well, it doesn't snap to text, so you're either going to use it carefully (slowly), or deal with another inaccurate squiggle. The eraser tool is fine, right? Sure, it's fine, but it's not great. You can't right click to erase. You can flip a surface pen over to use the eraser instantly (I'm only assuming because, again, I can't do that myself.), but you can't right click to get the same effect at the same speed. My mouse is special, it has back and and forwards buttons. Normally, these buttons would undo and redo actions. In Add notes, and also in Snip and Sketch, these awesome buttons do whatever the primary click button does. Why? Why do this? Right click doesn't do anything, which means you people had to decide to program this in! So yeah. Add notes is probably incredible with a Surface, but I don't have that. I could use Add notes if my line of work called for it, but I would constantly have the feeling that "this suite of tools isn't meant for MY computer." That's a really bad feeling to have.

 

I had planned on talking about the existing sharing options available in Add notes, but I don't use the tool myself, so let's move on to the third and final part of this text monolith:

 

Bugs.

Add notes in Classic Edge is really buggy. I have experimented with add notes for about an hour for the first time in over a year, and I've discovered that:

The back and forwards buttons will only mirror the action of the left mouse button after you've left clicked on the page at least once.

If you open and close Add notes on the New tab page, the page's loading circle will spin for 30 or more seconds. 

clipboard_image_1.png The new tab page isn't supposed to ever display a loading circle.

If you activate Add notes on a secondary display of comparatively lower resolution, a massive empty space will be included with your notes experience, free of charge.

Do you want fries with that?Do you want fries with that? This blank area is even included in exports.

Add notes takes a quick screenshot of the existing page when it's launched. There is an instant while the Add notes toolbar is initializing where you can drag and drop that screenshot instead of drawing on top of it.

Sometimes when you take a clip, it shows up in your clipboard as a blank gray square. I'm not posting it here because I fear it will break this post.

If you save or share your work, any ink already on the page will be converted into a png. Not only does this dramatically lower the quality of the ink by blurring the edges, but it makes the ink permanent - it can't be erased without closing and reopening Add notes.

 

Why am I making a laundry list bug report about software that may never be updated again? Because the Microsoft Edge team spent YEARS trying to fix these issues. Some people in this comment section are now expecting feature parity, without serious bugs, in two months. TWO MONTHS?!? That's not possible! Classic Edge's stability was, at least for me, legendarily awful. Yeah, I loved the favorites menu and the download manager and Cortana integration, but I often had to open up Chrome when submitting homework or doing anything that absolutely wasn't allowed to crash. I think we have made ourselves abundantly clear that Edge "is" everything detailed in this handy checklist: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge but more than anything we "need" a browser that won't self-destruct when we try to do basic things like drag tabs up above the address bar. (yes, that was a real, easy to reproduce bug on the stable version of Edge Classic that came with Windows 1803 or 1809, I don't remember which...) The Edge development team has been choosing their battles of what to focus on for launch in January; in my opinion, they've been choosing those battles very wisely. I would rather not have another glass mansion of unusable features, even if that means having only a solid foundation for now.


 

I also felt the need to writes notes in screenshots I take with Snip & Sketch too.
I use mouse + KB, no touch at all. if i wanted to write something on my screenshots, I would need to do it with mouse and it looks ugly and barely readable.
the add notes functionality in the Edge classic sounds good to be added to Snip & Sketch.

 

I just created a feedback for it in Feedbacks hub app, feel free to upvote it, add more details and screenshots to make them understand what we are exactly referring to. I myself added a screenshot of how Edge classic lets us add small sticky notes to the screenshot.

 

here is the feedback:

https://aka.ms/AA6l4j9

@Elliot Kirk 

 

For me, Inking is hugely useful. I'm a student so I spend a lot of time researching journal articles, websites and ebooks. A lot of my lecture and university-provided material is online too. The ability to ink all over these webpages, highlighting key points, scribbling notes and printing/sending to OneNote has been really useful for cutting down how much paper I have to use and for interacting with what I read and summarising it. I do this both during lectures and when studying at home.

Aside from just academic stuff, I've been using it a fair bit when I've planned holidays/travelling 

 

With regards to tools, I think the ability to use a stylus such as a Surface Pen to draw in a variety of colours and thicknesses, and the ability to highlight, are the two big ones I'd personally like from this feature. Saving-wise, the ablility to print, to paper and/or PDF for sharing would be great, and the ability for any web annotations to be sent to OneDrive like in the old Edge.

 

Thanks!

@Elliot Kirk 

I'm thrilled to learn that inking is moving up on the road map. My #1 use for the Surface Pro X is inking PDFs. I'm on several nonprofit boards, and I add notes, comments, and highlights when reviewing board packets. It's super useful to stay in Edge, save to OneDrive, and head for meetings thoroughly prepared. Thanks so much Team!! 

Oh yeah; I kind of forgot about that. :grinning_face_with_sweat:

@HotCakeX 

 

I'd love to add details to your suggestion, but my Feedback Hub won't let me access your feedback. I've been having various issues with Feedback Hub; even Resetting the application from Windows Settings didn't help. Could you tell me the title of your feedback so that I can search for it?

 

clipboard_image_1.png

@HotCakeX Even if the phone itself failed, I still use in tablet mode on the computer sometimes and I like it. 

@WolfIcefang 

Spoiler

@WolfIcefang wrote:

@HotCakeX 

 

I'd love to add details to your suggestion, but my Feedback Hub won't let me access your feedback. I've been having various issues with Feedback Hub; even Resetting the application from Windows Settings didn't help. Could you tell me the title of your feedback so that I can search for it?

 

clipboard_image_1.png


Oh i'm sorry I think it's because I'm on Windows insider fast ring so our feedbacks are not accessible to stable ring users.

 

here is the feedback

 

Annotation 2019-11-15 204259.png

 

you could do something though, go to the Windows settings, enroll into Windows insider release preview ring, pause Windows updates, wait few minutes and close/reopen feedbacks hub app, it should let you access Windows insider feedbacks now.

once you get access, you will have it forever then you can quit the insider program.

 

I did this trick on someone else's account and it worked :)

@cjc2112 


@cjc2112 wrote:

@HotCakeX Even if the phone itself failed, I still use in tablet mode on the computer sometimes and I like it. 


Hi,

Umm the Windows phone?