New Features in Microsoft Edge
Redesigned Hub and better PDF reading experience: Microsoft has excelled Edge more as a PDF reader than as a browser. If you deal with PDF on daily basis, Edge almost delivers the experience of a dedicated PDF reader for Windows 10. This new interface offers the following features:
Floating Bar for all the PDF controls.Seak Bar to search across PDF.Full-Screen mode for distraction less reading.Books purchased from the store will sync progress, bookmarks, notes, annotations and other things.Includes a Grammar tool when you want to understand words better right being in the app.Save EPUB books in the Edge browser, add bookmarks to pages manually for both EPUB, and PDF, and manage everything from one place.
Push notifications & Progressive Web Apps support If you subscribe to notifications from websites, Edge now supports it. Next time when you visit a website, and it prompts you, accept and Edge will take care of all the new notifications coming from that website. The best part is that they would be visible in the action center which will make sure you don’t miss them at all. Edge also supports loading of websites which work offline. This gets things faster, and its only refreshed when needed. This is where the Progressive Web Apps come into play. Edge supports it. PWAs are web wrappers with the ability to hook into Windows 10 Action center, notifications and so on. Microsoft is also using Bring Crawler to identify if popular websites can support PWA without developing anything, and can automate it when needed. Recently Microsoft rolled out a lot of PWA in the store. Some examples are Skyscanner, OfferFinder, Day Trip and so on Variable Fonts for Microsoft Edge Browser OpenType Variable Fonts has been built in collaboration between Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google, and others. It enables rich typography rendering, and the font can be customized by the developers. Imagine if fonts can be animated, tilted, appear like the storyline, and so on. When using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator in Creative Cloud 2018, you will be able to modify the variable fonts right there. That said, you will be able to check out these fonts in Settings which is available with Windows 10 Spring Creators Update. Clutter-Free Printing: Even though small, but one of the best feature Edge has now. When you print something from the web or a post from a website, there are tons of advertisement, sidebar, extra images, and so on. They not only make printing tough but also doesn’t deliver the great reading experience.
Edge has a new option “Clutter Free” in its print interface, and show up when you print from Edge. It lets you print without advertisement, and in a readable format. Below is the difference. https://youtu.be/_XIDCA6BcE8
Other smaller improvements with Edge:
Mute audio for individual tabs.Save card information and auto-complete the card information whenever required.Data such as CVV of credit card is not stored when PCs sync with each other.It is possible to block password saving for certain websites.The fluent design is one of the major highlights of the creator’s update, but it took a while for Microsoft to make it universal. Edge finally has it, and the overall experience is much smoother, visuals are good, and instead of just being dark, you have contrast with darker black and all other colors.
I am sure there are more improvements to Edge which we all experience as we use it. However, one caveat remains that Edge only updates with a major version of Windows Update which is terribly slow compared to the updates, and features that are coming to Chrome & Firefox. Microsoft should make it an app that can be updated through the store.
