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Microsoft’s Edge browser has become much more attractive. After entering the preview four months ago, Microsoft will roll out vertical tabs to all users this month.
Web browser designers have merged around the idea that tabs belong to a horizontal bar at the top, which reduces the amount of space for a site to appear and increases the need for scrolling. With ultra-wide monitors becoming more popular, Microsoft believes there is a better way.
As shown in the animation below, the new Edge feature allows you to keep tabs in a vertical pane on the left side. To avoid overshadowing a website, changing the user interface allows you to reduce the text to a simple logo with one click.
Chrome can mimic this feature to some extent with extensions like this, but as far as we can tell, the developers aren’t able to hide the original tabs, which means you end up with it again. less space for the actual website.
Interestingly, vertical tabs were a feature of Chrome ten years ago, but the company killed it due to a lack of adoption. “As an experiment, the side tabs weren’t successful – a small number of people really liked them passionately, but they ended up not being convincing enough to make the cut,” one developer wrote in 2011.
Expressing regret that the company “left the experience for too long” given the attachment to the functionality developed by so many users afterwards, the developer explained that such difficult decisions were vital in order to keep the browser as simple as possible.
“We torture ourselves over things like this – it comes down to painful decisions to keep Chrome light,” the developer continued. “We know that a feature like this is really important to a number of users (and Chrome developers!), But at the same time, we have to continually cut and crop things, knowing that these cuts are going to annoy them. people, so Chrome doesn’t. t turn into bloatware that no one satisfies. “
But a decade is a long time ago in tech, and uptake of ultra-wide monitors is higher in 2021 than it was in 2011. Microsoft clearly thinks the time has come to relaunch vertical tabs – and if corporate instinct is correct, it would be hugely surprising if the likes of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari haven’t followed suit for fear of losing widescreen users to a rival.
Vertical tabs aren’t the only upgrade Edge is getting this month. Microsoft is also providing a “startup boost,” which launches the browser in the background when users turn on their devices. The company estimates that this will cut Edge’s boot time from 29% to 41% – although this is of course an illusion if it is using up system resources by running silently in the background.
Browser history is also reworked. Rather than taking an entire page, it will now appear as a drop-down menu in the toolbar, and it can be pinned to the side for convenience.
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