Overnight Build 10147 of Windows 10 leaked to the internet and included in it, is Microsoft Edge. The new browser which has received the long awaited name change from Project Spartan to Edge. The new browser has a couple of neat tricks, but the most important to productivity and dual-screen users is certainly tear-off tabs.
Those of us who are multitasking demons will be running 2 or 3 monitors to work across a number of applications at once. Traditionally this worked great when we lived in desktop software applications, but as more and more we find ourselves using web applications, we need to multi-task with those. Until now, Project Spartan was missing a critical feature that let’s you open tabs in a single window, then tear them off to another monitor in a separate window.
While there was a clumsy two-step process of right clicking and opening in new window, then manually dragging the window to the other monitor, it wasn’t good enough and certainly would have left me running to Chrome if they decided that was the way forward. Thankfully the developers at Microsoft seen the error of their ways and have addressed this in the new build.
The change isn’t perfect though, first off, when you click and drag the tab away from the current window, your cursor changes to a cross, like it’s an invalid operation, but it works. The second issue is that you can drag tabs back into an existing window. This is useful when you’re trying to side-by-side two websites and you really don’t care which window that tab is in. It also helps to keep memory management down, by having less than the worst-case scenario of 1 window per tab.
Despite the to-do-list not being empty, the new black theme is fantastic, the browser seems a lot more stable, performant and sites can be pinned to the start menu (still not taskbar like dragging the favicon in IE). Under advanced settings there’s now the ability to not only add the Home button, but to set the address, as well as the option to add other providers for search when you just start typing in the dual-purpose bar at the top of Edge.
Just FYI, if you run a WordPress site, dragging and dropping images into the media uploader still does not work in Edge.
