Microsoft made a slew of announcements today, including a ton of new features for its already existing apps, and a new Teams version for general consumers. But an announcement that probably didn’t grab as much attention as it should have, is the introduction of a bunch of new features for Microsoft’s chromium-based browser, Edge.
The latest update will see the introduction of vertical tabs, a feature that includes a drop-down list of all the active tabs on the left of the screen instead of the traditional horizontal tabs at the top. The concept is a fairly new one with only a few other browsers providing it. But the feature won’t be immediately rolled out, with the beta program only getting the feature in the coming months.
Another feature worth mentioning is Password Monitor, a robust password protection mechanism that notifies the user if it feels the user credentials have been stolen. It also redirects the user to the concerned portal to change the password.
Microsoft has also introduced a “Smart Copy” feature for the browser, which will preserve the format of text or tables when copied from the internet to a document, saving the user from the torment of reworking the text that usually followed when copying from websites.
Additionally, the Edge also gets a ‘Collections’ feature, which is a more sophisticated and much more intuitive avatar of your poor old Bookmarks folder. Users can simply drag and drop texts, images or pages from the web to specific collections that they create. For journos like us, we can simply drag relevant images related to news stories, quotes, tags, textual content etc. to collections to access them later while drafting our piece.
There is also a more refined tracker prevention mechanism on offer in the Edge. Whether on mobile or desktop, you can select one of three settings that’s right for you – Basic, Balanced or Strict. Depending on which setting you choose, Microsoft Edge will adjust the types of third-party trackers blocked.
Microsoft had introduced the Chromium-based Edge back in 2018, as a much needed replacement of the seriously out-of-time Internet Explorer. Since then, the company has rolled out continuous updates to Edge, stating how serious it is to get back into the browser wars which are currently dominated by Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox.
