Microsoft Is Bringing One of Edge’s Tab Management Features to Chrome

Microsoft’s new Edge browser is based on Chromium, and the company has been making a ton of changes to the open-source Chromium project over the last few months for its new browser. Most of these changes, however, have so far been under the hood.

And although these changes are quite important, Microsoft is yet to contribute any real features to Chromium. Well, until recently.

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Microsoft engineers are actually working to bring one of Edge’s tab management features to Chromium and Chrome (via MSPU). Microsoft’s new Edge browser has a new feature that allows users to move multiple tabs to a different window, and it’s a really useful feature for power users who tend to have a ton of tabs open. The feature isn’t actually available on Chrome, but a Chromium engineer recently requested the feature to be added to Chromium from Edge.

Following the initial request, a Microsoft engineer offered to bring the feature to Chromium from Edge and the changes were recently submitted on Chromium Gerrit:

Move tab to new window supports multiple selection Adds support for moving multiple tabs to a new window from the tab context menu. Also correctly handles pinned tabs, preserving their pinned state in the new window. Since multiple tabs now can be moved, the string was changed to pluralize “tab” to “tabs” when necessary.

This may not be a major feature to many, but this could mark the beginning of more user-facing contributions from Microsoft on Chromium and Chrome. The feature could take a little while to actually show up on Google Chrome, but considering it is already very functional on Edge, it may not take too long to test the feature and bring it to the public.

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Conversation 12 comments

  • cr08

    27 January, 2020 - 8:53 am

    <p>Correct me if I'm wrong as I'm not terribly familiar with legacy Edge's featureset:</p><p><br></p><p>But based on the writing here it seems like this is a feature that has already existed in Chrome/Chromium just under a slightly different method of use. Under Chrome/Chromium you can Ctrl+click specific tabs you want to move as a group and once selected just drag normally out of one window and either into its own or an existing browser window.</p>

    • safesax2002

      27 January, 2020 - 10:07 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#516110">In reply to cr08:</a></em></blockquote><p>Cool! I learned something new.</p>

    • leonardo

      27 January, 2020 - 12:54 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#516110">In reply to cr08:</a></em></blockquote><p>Yes, this has to<span style="background-color: rgb(16, 25, 34); –darkreader-inline-bgcolor:#232930;" data-darkreader-inline-bgcolor=""> do with an entry available in Edge's tab context menu, that same entry was added to Chrome Canary three weeks ago, but it still doesn't have the same options as in Edge, Microsoft will add those options, besides</span>, have you tried to do what you say with tablet mode enabled in Windows 10?</p>

  • longhorn

    27 January, 2020 - 11:31 am

    <p>It's unfair that macOS users get a menu bar, while Chromium/Chrome/Edge users on Windows and Linux don't have that option.</p><p><br></p>

    • jimchamplin

      Premium Member
      27 January, 2020 - 11:45 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#516135">In reply to longhorn:</a></em></blockquote><p>It’s a pervasive part of the OS. It can’t not be there. Might as well use it.</p><p><br></p><p>Ive seen too many poorly ported Java and Electron apps that ignore the menubar and roll their own shitty solution.</p>

      • longhorn

        27 January, 2020 - 2:31 pm

        <blockquote><em><a href="#516137">In reply to jimchamplin:</a></em></blockquote><p>Well, whenever I use something Chromium based I miss the menu bar so I always return to Firefox or Pale Moon. Unfortunately, some sites require Chrome(ium).</p><p><br></p><p>Because of lack of menu bar, the bookmarks bar is required for easy bookmark access. It's thick and only does one thing, a waste of vertical space if you ask me.</p><p><br></p>

  • reefer

    27 January, 2020 - 1:31 pm

    <p>Perhaps they should focus on developing synk features more, history, addons, collections and open tabs are missing in the sharp version of new edge or perhaps they didnt notice.</p>

  • ghostrider

    27 January, 2020 - 2:39 pm

    <p>My belief is that over time – years maybe – MS will try to Microsoft-ifize Chromium, slowly turning it into the browser they never had, but want. It's perfectly possible, and follows a well trodden path for MS – Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. We've seen it all before. Could this be one of the reasons MS are cosying up to as much open-source as they can?</p><p>What's apparent though is that MS aren't contributing much of their own stuff to the open source community – a couple of small things here and there, but nothing substantial. There were cries a few years back for MS to make Media Center open source, but no dice. Now there are calls for Win7 to go open-source, but I can't see that ever happening either. Win10's win32 code-base is probably mostly identical to Win7's, so that could be them opening up Windows <em>even more</em> to hackers if they did.</p>

  • saint4eva

    27 January, 2020 - 2:46 pm

    <p>Dear writer, kindly note that Microsoft has contributed a lot to the Chromium source code. </p>

  • wright_is

    Premium Member
    28 January, 2020 - 4:43 am

    <p><em>Most of these changes, however, have so far been under the hood.And although these changes are quite important, Microsoft is yet to contribute any real features to Chromium</em></p><p>You make it sound like "features" can't be under the hood and that making the system more stable and secure isn't a worthwhile exercise, because it isn't new features…</p><p>I'd rather they invest heavily "under the hood", not just in Chromium, but also in Windows and make things more stable, we don't really need so many new features, we need a secure and stable platform on which to work. Save the eye candy for when the real work has been done.</p><p>(I'm not saying that the moving tabs to another window isn't a nice-to-have feature, but there are more important things that also need to be done, that the user can't see. The emphasis these days on eye-candy over real work shows that engineering is becoming as superficial as humanity in general, which is no good thing.</p>

  • IanYates82

    Premium Member
    28 January, 2020 - 6:24 am

    <p>I just ctrl+click a few tabs and then drag them away. Works in Chrome as far as I recall. Opera too </p>

  • rokeykokey

    31 January, 2020 - 8:57 am

    <p>I just want them to add proper tab previews and tab discarding from the old Edge.</p>

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