It's easy to forget just how handy the humble bookmark – or favorite – is. The ability to jump to a site without having to type a single letter is a great time-saver, and Microsoft is introducing a raft of changes in its Edge browser to make the feature even more useful and easy to use.
The company acknowledges that managing bookmarked sites is currently a little awkward as it involves navigating away from the page you are currently visiting. As such, the changes that are currently being tested not only gives much easier access to Favorites, but also some impressive management options.
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At the moment, Edge offers two ways to interact with Favorites. The dropdown menu provides easy access to your bookmarked sites, so you can visit them quickly. But for more hands-on management, you need to visit the Favorites pages which means breaking off from what you're currently doing.
The new 'experience' – as Microsoft is referring to it – blends these two ideas together combining the best of both worlds. From the updated menu it is not only possible to visit sites via neat tree structure, but also reorder, rename and edit your bookmarks.
The update also makes it possible to search your Favorites without having to visit the full Favorites pages. Other handy options include the ability to import and export from the Favorites menu, remove duplicate entries and more.
What's your favorite?
Microsoft points out that: "The new favorites menu stays around while you need it and disappears when you’re done, making it easy to open or manage multiple favorites at once."
If you prefer, however, you can pin the Favorites pane to the side of the browser window, so it remains accessible while you perform multiple bookmark-related tasks. And – in the name of choice – the old Favorites pages remains available at edge://favorites, or by clicking the ... button in Favorites and selecting the Manage favorites option
For the time being, the new 'Favorites experience' is only available to people running the Developer or Canary builds of Edge. While these are both going to be less stable than the normal release version, if you would like to try out the new features, these preview versions of the browser can be safely installed alongside the main release and can be downloaded here.
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Via OnMSFT
