Business is harsh and can be unforgiving. But one of the keys for success in the tech world, is to always improvise by delivering new things.
Microsoft is the tech giant, popular for its various software products. And here, it has announced several updates for its Edge browser and Bing search engine, which are aimed at making browsing experience more seamless, and at the same time, further differentiating itself from rival Google and its offerings.
First of, is the Microsoft Edge browser.
Microsoft has improved Edge by adding support for vertical tabs.
These tabs reside on the side of the browser as icons, but can expand to full title sizes when users hover over them.
What Edge does here, is utilizing the most out of users' screen aesthetic. Knowing that widescreen displays are more than common, Edge with vertical tabs won't ruin experience as much as the traditional horizontal tabs, even when more information is added to them.
The idea, is to make it easier for users to see all of their tabs in one place.
As tab hoarders, Edge users can clearly scroll through the tabs, rather than trying to guess what each increasingly smaller tab at the top of the screen does.
Activating vertical tabs is done by simply tapping a button on the upper left of the browser.
Besides the vertical tabs feature, Microsoft has also added two more updates to Edge.
The first one, is allowing users to access their browsing history as a dropdown menu rather than a separate tab, which should make it easy to check recent pages without leaving the page users are currently on.
The second, is Microsoft in introducing a feature called Startup boost, which does exactly what its name says.
According to Microsoft, the feature can speed up the browser launch 29% to 41% faster than before.
The second update at this time by Microsoft, is an update to Bing, its search engine.
In this update, the Bing update allows users to access a full-screen collage of text with accompanying images. This can be seen when searching for recipe, for example
Tapping on an image allows users to preview the ingredients and nutrition information, without having to read through the usual blocks of text and ads on the recipe pages.
Similarly, users can also look for crafts or home improvement ideas in a similar fashion, and use Bing's visual search engine to find items located in an image.
This feature is similar to Google Lens, with the only difference that it's inside a browser.
Besides this, Bing also makes its search results more useful for broad topics. This is done by displaying the data in a more-stylish infographic format.
"While exploring these visual results, you might see something you like but that’s difficult to describe with words. That’s why we’ve also integrated visual search into the experience, so you can quickly search using an image," wrote Microsoft on its blog post.