Tab Preview - Discussion

[Elliot Kirk]

Hi Insiders, thanks so much for your feedback on the tab experience in the new Microsoft Edge. From reading your comments, it is clear that many of you would like an easy way to view more information about your tabs to quickly identify which one you are looking for. This problem can be particularly painful when you have many tabs open at once, perhaps appearing similar to each other with repeated site titles or icons, and you'd like to avoid having to switch to each of them to find the right one. Many of you specifically cite "tab preview" from the legacy version of Microsoft Edge as a helpful tool in this situation.

Top Feedback Item: Bring the tab preview feature from the current version of Microsoft Edge

As we investigate this feedback further, we'd like to ask for your help to make sure we are solving the right problem and get the experience just right. For example, in the Microsoft Edge Legacy , there were actually a couple of methods to preview the contents of a tab. One way was to hover over a tab, and a little thumbnail and description of that specific tab would appear with more information. Another method was to select an arrow to the right of the new tab button to open a persistent preview of all the open tabs simultaneously.

Could you tell us more about your experience in this area, and what you would like to see going forward? For example, which of the legacy version of Microsoft Edge tab preview features did you specifically use, and how did you use it? What problems did this feature help you solve and how? What types of information is particularly useful in a preview of a tab and why?

Thanks for your help, we look forward to working with you to improve the new Microsoft Edge in this area.

[#2]

You can turn it off, it's not gonna be forced.

[#3]

Jeżeli można wyłączyć to wszystko OK !

[#4]

Yes,
edge://flags/#tab-hover-cards

[#5]

@Elliot Kirk, I just want to be able to see the whole tab description in the hover cards like it is visible when hovering on a tab with the hover cards turned off.

As an example,

The non card implementation shows the full title.

While the hover cards truncates the title after a certain length, which for me defeats the purpose of having it.

I know the above example may feel a bit too much but there are times when I need to look at the full title, not a truncated version. 

[#6]

I'm sure there is a functional benefit to having the tabs changed to the left side but I tried it out and may have found an issue. Most the time when I'm on a webpage and click an internal link it will bring that page up. It was opening every link I clicked up on a new tab,

[#7]

I'd be happy just to have the hover preview back.

[#8]

I have tab display on hover. I tested it on Canary and the Release Version (used to call it GA--general availability--back in the day), unless you're talking about something else.

Regards,

Dan

[#9]

Can you please make every tab to have its own thumbnail in task bar when hovering the Edge icon? Like old good IE12 did.

[#10]

jep hope you add it to the new edge

[#11]

Now that previews on hover are back, are there plans to bring the persistent previews back too? It's needed when looking through many open tabs and when using touch. Windows needs a browser which works well with touch, and Chromium Edge definitely does not.

[#12]

@Elliot Kirk, both options you describe would be nice, but please keep in mind some people may have trouble hovering their mouse over each tab to show a page preview once the tabs become very narrow. Also, you cannot hover over tabs to show a preview for the tabs that are not visible to the right (if Edge shows X number of tabs, once you have more than X tabs open, you cannot see those additional tabs on the right side).

Having the dropdown button to show all open tabs in a scrolling list should always work.

Another option is to have a scrolling tab bar to scroll through unpinned tabs. Firefox does this with "<" and ">" buttons at either end of the unpinned tabs.

Thank you for working on a solution to this problem.

[#13]

@jhahn0  I suggest you also uvote these suggestions on the feedback portal:

• Persistent preview of all tabs 
• Scrollable horizontal tab strip

[#14]

@MarinM thank you for the links. I have upvoted each feature.

I'm using profiles in Edge (one browser for standard online user accounts and a second browser for online admin accounts with different themes for each browser to help differentiate the two browser windows). I'm using vertical tabs in the browser that has a lot of tabs.

This is working well for me. It took some getting used to going to the left instead of the top for tabs, but it does allow you to scroll through all the open tabs. Pinned tabs stay in the upper section and unpinned tabs are in a section below that I scroll through. Vertical tabs means a narrower, but taller view for websites, which works fine, if not better, for many sites.

Even if the features above get implemented, I may continue to use vertical tabs. Vertical tabs was not a long term solution for me, but after using it for several weeks, I like it more and more.