Microsoft’s Edge browser just got a lot more attractive. After entering the preview four months ago, Microsoft will release vertical guides for all users this month.
Web browser designers have come together around the idea that tabs belong to a horizontal bar at the top, reducing the amount of space for a website to appear and increasing the need for scrolling. With ultra-wide displays becoming more and more popular, Microsoft believes there is a better way.
As shown in the animation below, the new Edge feature allows you to keep the guides in a vertical panel on the left. To avoid obscuring a website, changing the UI allows you to reduce the text to a simple logo with the click of a button.
Chrome can mimic this functionality to some extent with extensions like this, but as far as we can tell, developers are not able to hide the original tabs, which means that you end up with even less space for the actual website.
Interestingly, vertical guides have been a feature of Chrome for a decade, but the company eliminated it due to lack of acceptance. “As an experiment, the side guides were not a success – a small number of people really loved them passionately, but they ended up not being attractive enough to make the cut,” wrote a developer in 2011.
Regretting that the company “let the experiment last a long time” due to the attachment to the feature that so many users developed later, the developer explained that these difficult decisions were vital to keep the browser as simple as possible.
“We torture ourselves with things like this – it all comes down to painful decisions about how to keep Chrome lightweight,” continued the developer. “We know that a feature like this is really important for some users (and Chrome developers!), But at the same time we have to cut and trim things continuously, knowing that these cuts will bother people, so that Chrome does not transform in bloatware that no one likes. “
But a decade is a long time in technology, and the adoption of ultra-wide displays is greater in 2021 than in 2011. Microsoft clearly believes it is the right time to revive vertical guides – and if the company’s instinct is correct, it would be IS extremely surprising if names like Chrome, Firefox and Safari do not follow suit for fear of losing wide-screen users to a rival.
Vertical tabs are not the only update that Edge is receiving this month. Microsoft is also bringing the “startup boost,” which starts the browser in the background when users turn on their devices. The company estimates that this will reduce the Edge startup time by 29% to 41% – although, of course, this is an illusion if you are using system resources running silently in the background.
The browser history is also being revamped. Instead of taking up an entire page, it will now appear as a drop-down menu on the toolbar and can be pinned to the side for convenience.