Welcome back to the Top Feedback Summary, Insiders! We have a lot of quick updates coming at you this week after our small break, so let’s hop into it.
We’re marking several items as Addressed. The ability to ink on web pages has been around for a little bit, and we are now closing that item out this week. History sync has been available in our Canary and Dev channels for a bit, and we’re now comfortable marking this as addressed. Lastly, users can now use voice search on google.com in our Canary and Dev channels! If you aren’t seeing this option when you head to a site that has voice options, head to edge://flags to turn on the msSpeechRecognition flag. This should also fix issues with websites like Duolingo, which use the same feature. Please let us know if you spot any issues with this!
Today we are updating both Bring the tab preview feature from the current version of Microsoft Edge and Support two-page layout in PDF reader to Planned for January. The tab preview feature is something some Insiders have spotted, and we continue to work on it based on feedback we receive. We also announced that two-page support is now available in our Dev channel, however we are holding on closing it out for a bit as we continue to gather more feedback from users like yourselves. If you would like to give this feature a shot, we encourage you to open a multiple page PDF document and click the Page View button for those layout options.
That’s it for this week’s update. Have you checked out Josh’s change summary post recently? Every week when we update this feedback list, Josh also posts up every change that was made in the build, along with known issues. Head over to his post to get a glimpse of the updates and improvements we’ve made!
Make tabs more square and less rounded, like the current version of Microsoft Edge
47 weeks
And here’s the list of top “quality areas” that we’re actively working on in response to your feedback:
Bring more extensions to the extensions store
Edge should use less memory than it does
Edge should use less CPU than it does
Scrolling should feel smoother for web pages
Scrolling should feel smoother for PDF files
Opening a new tab is too slow
Update does not always work reliably
Definitions:
Addressed – Changes to address this feedback are visible to all users in the Canary and Dev channels
Not Planned – We don’t currently plan to address this feedback, though we will continue to track it and reconsider our approach if needed.
Planned for… – We’re working on this and currently plan for it to be addressed in the Canary channel before the end of the month indicated.
Planned - We have reviewed this feedback and have a plan to address it. However, we aren't ready to share a target time frame just yet.
Alternative Planned - We don’t currently plan to directly address this feedback; however, we are working on addressing this in the form of a new feature.
In Discussion – We’ve reviewed this feedback and to learn more we have started a discussion about it here in the Microsoft Edge Insider Forum.
Under Review – We are reviewing this feedback internally and do not have a plan to share at this time.
Quality Area – We will give extra weight to fixes and opportunities in this area. Please continue to report specific bugs and make specific asks.
@HotCakeX The start-up optimization was never enabled for me. Several restarts did not change anything and in edge/flags 'msSpeechRecognition' never shows.
The command-line flag is working partially, but the Web Speech API is buggy. It shows intermediate results but always ends with 'Network Error'. You can follow the ongoing (older) discussion here: Re: Web Speech API support ? - Page 2 - Microsoft Tech Community
It is working in Google search though. Maybe only certain configurations of the API are buggy.
[EDIT] Actually it seems the feature is enabled now even when I remove the command-line flag. 'msSpeechRecognition' is nowhere to be found though.
@HotCakeX Voice search on Bing always worked because it uses Microsoft Azure services and not Web Speech API. Google voice search started working at some point, I can't say really what changed but my own apps (that work fine in Chrome) have the 'Network' issue described in the topic I linked. I've reported this bug through the official channels a few weeks ago btw.
@HotCakeX Currently: Yes. Since I don't know exactly when it started working (I've tried it a couple of times with most recent Canary) I can't guarantee though that its reproducible ^^.
Something that should work on any HTTPS page (just open the Dev Tools and type it in) is this:
var rec = new window.webkitSpeechRecognition();
rec.onresult = console.log;
rec.onerror = console.error;
rec.start();
I still have to find out which configuration option is messing it up for my app.
I just tried it on this website, Edge asked me to use mic and i enabled it, nothing happened after, does it mean it's working? 🙂 because when I try the same thing on Edge stable 87, i get an error on the console after allowing the mic access.
@HotCakeX You should see that the mic is enabled by the animated red dot next to the browser tab and if you start speaking you should see results popping up in the dev console ... or error messages 😉
Hi, There was no mention of the "open in new tab" issues.
Currently the website is able to block both right click and Ctrl click, and sites such as MSN abuse this issue to make life difficult for anyone clicking on an advertising link.
I can't see any reason for the website to be able override the user's explicit intention.
@MissyQ I'm interested in the Addressed status for the History and Tab Sync.
Can you confirm that this is still only rolling out to some Dev channel users, and only in certain regions, and that it still doesn't have any sync to mobile? We've not seen it show up on any Dev browsers yet. All users in Canada.
Seems like this is only barely partially addressed?
I really love to see Tab preview is coming, I am wondering will that support live preview too? For example, let say I have video playing in one tab and if I check the tab in preview will I see it playing or I only see snapshot of the tab?
@MissyQ I'm interested in the Addressed status for the History and Tab Sync.
Can you confirm that this is still only rolling out to some Dev channel users, and only in certain regions, and that it still doesn't have any sync to mobile? We've not seen it show up on any Dev browsers yet. All users in Canada.
Seems like this is only barely partially addressed?
Last time an Edge developer replied to a question about controlled feature roll outs availability, they said that it's not run in Canada, or at least not in full capacity, nor is it run in countries US cut ties with.
it's easily verifiable by just switching your IP to different countries and restarting Edge a couple of times and see how features disappear.
Hi, There was no mention of the "open in new tab" issues.
Currently the website is able to block both right click and Ctrl click, and sites such as MSN abuse this issue to make life difficult for anyone clicking on an advertising link.
I can't see any reason for the website to be able override the user's explicit intention.
Hi,
I think that's a grey area, to decide which party has the right to control the experience.
users have the right to use their browsers and website developers have the right to setup their website and user experience however they want.
anyway, there are extensions to fix this for now until they make it built in or something
When clicking on the webpage microphone at www.google.com, after a second or two the message "No internet connection" replaces the Google search box. The browser tab does show the red recording dot and the microphone symbol appears in the address bar.
Yup, exactly experiencing the same thing. this could be an intentional move by Google, wouldn't be their first time. because web speech API works now in that demo above
Thanks for the extension. At least it proves I am not alone in seeking out a fix.
The real danger is that when combined with breaking the back button, a user can be trapped and lose access to earlier sites in the chain. Remember many users are not able to use the browsers history. There needs to be a very strong case for anything that results in an outcome the user did not expect or, even worse, wanted to avoid.
Thanks for the extension. At least it proves I am not alone in seeking out a fix.
The real danger is that when combined with breaking the back button, a user can be trapped and lose access to earlier sites in the chain. Remember many users are not able to use the browsers history. There needs to be a very strong case for anything that results in an outcome the user did not expect or, even worse, wanted to avoid.
Why many users are not able to use browsers' history?
breaking the back button how?
I personally use ublock origin + tracking prevention set to strict in Edge (whitelisted some domains like Microsoft domains, Twitter etc.)
you can also use extensions like NoScript to stop websites from doing anything malicious.
While NoScript's main point is script blocking, it has many "extra" security features (some hidden), such as XSS filter, ABE, ClearClick, inclusion type checking, etc.
µMatrix is useful for easy per-site permissions as well as some generic content-type filtering (the latter being partially defense-in-depth with NoScript). For example I use it to restrict which sites can load content from "generic" CDNs such as cloudfront.net. However, µMatrix does not have fine-grained blocking (it is an "Internet firewall" acting only on domains).
uBlock Origin is useful largely for privacy protection & the like (µMatrix is cumbersome for that, and NoScript is a security tool not a privacy tool). It's also the best way to really fine-tune the other add-ons' permissions.
so
uBO alone doesn't protect against first-party attacks or special attacks like XSS/CSRF (maybe clickjacking to some extent, by blocking frames; not comprehensive)
NoScript alone doesn't give privacy-oriented control such as site-specific permissions (unless you want to spend a lot of time with ABE)
uMatrix alone doesn't provide surrogates (or similar), or protocol-specific whitelisting (ie HTTPS only), nor can it block scripts in some special cases like data: URIs, and it will miss some special attacks like tabnapping.
NoScript + uBO could cover everything, but the interface for third-party requests in uBO is less advanced than uMatrix.
uBO + uMatrix covers most things, just not some special cases.
NoScript + uMatrix is comprehensive, but will have a lot of double-handling unless you use something like cascading permissions.
for maximum protection and worry-free browsing, use all 3 of them + tracking prevention in Edge.
they all support import/export for configurations so you only have to configure them once
Hmm, web history is such an old term in browsers that I can't believe someone still is out there using browsers and not knowing how to use browsing history. thanks to browsers like Chrome, the terms has been widely familiarized. oh that's great
