Walyou

Exit Project Spartan, Enter Annotation-Packed Microsoft Edge

Posted: 02 May 2015 01:50 PM PDT

At Build 2015, Microsoft announced that it ditched the Project Spartan name for Windows 10′s IE replacement. Instead, the company has decided to call its new browser Edge, thus suggesting its great degree of novelty.

One of the best new features Edge will come with is the ability to annotate pages and share the created notes with co-workers, friends and family. As of now, there aren’t that many options to save and filter content on Web pages, and I think that we can all agree that we are not always interested in the whole content found on a page. Sometimes we save a page for only a few details, and remembering which are those details at a later point in time might prove difficult.

Some of us even go the extra mile and print Web pages in order to annotate the content that sparked interest. That’s not only a waste of time, but also of paper and writing instruments. On top of that, losing printed pages isn’t the most difficult thing in the world, and we all know how frustrating that can be. Microsoft is looking to solve all these problems with Edge by enabling users to emphasize directly on the Web page the details they want to retrieve later.

Saving the annotations is possible both on the local machine and in the cloud, the second option probably being the safest. Assuming that users are logged into their Microsoft account when using Edge, the next time they’re visiting the page, the annotations will show up, thus helping them to remember why they made those notes in the first place. The next logical feature to add was the ability to share annotated pages, and luckily for Edge users, that has been implemented.

Probably the best thing about these annotations is that Edge doesn’t rely on any plugins to create them. This brings to mind another browser that used to be feature-packed, before its developers decided to use Chromium as the rendering engine. Opera could’ve been one of the best browsers in the world, as many of its unique features (that have later been adopted by others) were built into it. Hopefully Edge will manage to bring unprecedented speed and functionality to the table, especially since Microsoft promises that Chrome and Firefox extensions could make their way to Edge with minimal code changes.

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