Windows 11 is looming on the horizon and it’s set to begin
rolling on October 5. Ahead of the scheduled rollout, Microsoft
Edge 93 has been released with support for two experimental
features: a new design for menus and
modern scrollbars to match the Fluent style of Windows 11.
Microsoft Edge 93 comes with several improvements and a few new
features. For example, Microsoft has enabled support for
Chrome-like tab groups, which has been designed to help users
find tabs effectively, so they can switch and manage tabs
easily.
Edge 93 also includes support for “pick up where you left off”
for the PDF documents. Likewise, you can easily watch videos in
picture-in-picture mode using a new toolbar that will appear
when you hover over a supported video. The toolbar simply lets
you view that video in a PiP window.
The vertical tabs design has been updated with a new option in
edge://settings/appearance to hide the browser’s title bar. In
addition to these improvements, Microsoft has also introduced
support for new experimental features: Windows 11 Visual
Updates and Overlay scrollbars
The first flag will turn on the Mica effect, which is a new
Windows 11-exclusive design material that automatically applies
the colour of the desktop background to the active window. The
Mica effect applies to the title bar of the browser only, as
you can see in the below screenshot.
It also enables Fluent Design’s acrylic effect (partial
transparency) for the Edge menu and context menus. If you
enable the flag on Windows 11, it will tweak the size of menu
fonts so they appear a little larger. In addition to font
changes, it also centers some buttons, including the minimize,
maximize and close.
On the other hand, Overlay scrollbars is fully supported on
both Windows 11 and Windows 10. The overlay scrollbars flag
offer a slimmed-down design for the browser’s default scrollbar
and it also supports dark mode.
More importantly, the “overlay scrollbars” feature has been
designed to match the look and feel of Windows 11 apps like
Settings and Explorer.
In order to try these features, you’ll need Edge 93 (stable) or
newer. Once you’ve updated to the latest version, open the Edge
flags menu and enable the Windows 11 visual updates flag.
To try the new scrollbars in Edge 93, open the properties tab
of Edge and add the following code to the target field:
--enable-features=OverlayScrollbar,OverlayScrollbarWinStyle,OverlayScrollbarWinStyleAnimation
It’s possible that Microsoft will introduce further visual
updates to Edge in the coming months for Windows 11 users.
