This One Browser Change Could Make Switching To Edge Worth It

It's no secret that Microsoft Edge is working from behind when it comes to growing its userbase. After Internet Explorer spent years as the butt of pretty much every joke concerning web browsers, Microsoft decided to hit the reset button by renaming the browser Edge and making a number of changes to it. For the past few years, Microsoft has been building up Edge as a worthy competitor to the likes of Chrome, Opera, and Firefox, and today, the Edge team is launching a new feature that might help turn some heads.

That feature, as outlined on the Windows Blog, is vertical tabs. When browsing the internet, most of us probably wind up with a ton of open tabs – as I write this, in fact I have 26 tabs open across two Firefox windows, and that's after a couple of tab purges already today. In short, many of us know that it can get very crowded at the top of our browsers, and Microsoft hopes to fix that issue in Edge with the introduction of vertical tabs.

Part of the issue with having a ton of open tabs is that it eventually becomes to difficult to see which tab is which at-a-glance. Vertical tabs solves this issue by moving your tabs into a left-hand sidebar that expands when you hover over it.

That way, you don't have to worry about tab text being crowded out. Users will be able to switch between horizontal and vertical layouts by clicking a button in the upper left corner of their browser window, allowing them to switch between layouts on the fly – for instance, switching to a vertical layout may help you quickly clean up your tabs without worrying about closing one you need to keep open.

It's a small change, but it could prove to be very useful. It'll be a while before it goes live for all Edge users, though, as Microsoft says that it's expected to land in Insider channels at some point in the next few months.