Forum Discussion
MicrosoftReading List - Discussion
We wanted to thank everyone again for their feedback around Reading Lists. We have internally acknowledged that Reading List as a feature was not able to meet the needs of our users. While we do have some very passionate users of this feature, the truth is that it wasn’t used much in Legacy Edge. With these things in mind, we have decided to not implement this feature into chromium-based Edge.
For alternatives, we still believe that the ones mentioned in the original post are what will work best for users. Collections have had several new features implemented recently, and we encourage you to give them a try. If you’re curious as to where your Reading Lists went when you updated to new Edge, they should be located in your Favorites under the Other favorites folder listed as Reading List.
While we are not going to bring this feature to new Edge, we are always listening and making choices based on all your feedback. Please continue to send in the feedback about what you would love to see or what you think is missing!
Thanks,
The Microsoft Edge Team
While I agree with many other posts in this thread, I feel like adding my own voice.
Reading List, to me, was useless in Old Edge. It felt like it was just a folder in Favorites that looked special. I was turned off from it because, while Favorites could be transferred to Chrome or another browser, the Reading List was stuck on Edge. I do not want to see the return of Reading List in Edge. Collections has already borrowed the visual style of Reading List; I could just create a collection called Reading List and call it a day. For the Stable release of Edge, importing Reading List should create a Collection in Collections instead of a folder in Favorites. The only point of using Reading List in Classic Edge was the unique visual style.
I do not want the Edge team to end up with four unique ways to save lists of web pages. We are planning:
Favorites (already here, must be kept the same for compatibility with other browsers)
Collections (already here, brand new, and awesome)
Set Aside Tabs (Not here yet, but pretty unique)
Reading List (imported into favorites)
When we talk about Reading List features, we're talking about features that were not in old Edge. These brand new features could be added to the brand new Collections. For example, the ability to choose "view offline" on a collection by collection basis would be neat. Another feature I have wanted for a while is the ability for the Reading List to remember what part of a webpage you stopped reading at - just like a bookmark in a real book. "Bookmark section" would be a great feature in collections too; I sometimes save an entire webpage to a collection because of a 2 paragraph chunk 3/4th through an article. Inking on webpages isn't out yet, but I'd assume that'll be as useful in Collections as it would have been in Reading list.
Arguably, the Reading List has enough potential to be its own unique tool, and this had been making me uncertain about my desire to see it be ignored in favor of collections. However, while writing this post, I realized something: if Reading List is added with unique features, it would really be depriving Collections of greater flexibility. If Collections retained all of its current features plus all planned Reading List features, users wouldn't have to choose which tool to use. They wouldn't be saying "jeez, I really wish I could use Collections for the notes and organization, but it needs to be offline so I guess it's getting put in reading list."
I can only see one potential negative in this: Collections might end up overcomplicated. That's something I can't really predict, so I'm sticking with what I've said here.
