Way back in July 2020, Microsoft started experimenting with a
Microsoft Edge feature called ‘tab preview’ that lets you hover
over a tab to view the thumbnail of the page and title/URL.
Tab previews are not new to Chromium-based browsers and Edge
browser already comes with hidden experimental flags that let
users enable previews. If you want to preview the tabs with
their thumbnail, search for ‘Tab Hover Cards’ and ‘Tab Hover
Card Images’ in Edge://flags menu, and enable them.
Tab preview was available in legacy Edge and Microsoft has been
known to be working on the feature for Chromium version too,
but the company has not yet enabled the functionality in Edge
by default.
A new Chromium commit suggests that Microsoft has again started
exploring support for tab preview (hover cards).
According to the commit,
Microsoft is working on a change that will detect system
animation setting prior to animating the tab cards. For
example, if you’ve turned off animations in Windows 10,
Microsoft Edge tab preview will respect the preference and it
won’t render the hover animation.
“This change would turn off animations for the Tab Hover cards
when a user opts out of animations via their computer system
settings. Many other animations use this check prior to
animating as well,” Microsoft noted.
At the moment, it’s unclear when default support for tab
previews will land in Microsoft Edge, but it’s possible that it
will be included in the second big update of the year, which is
scheduled to arrive in March.
In addition to tab previews,
Microsoft is also said to be working on a new search tool for
your PDF documents, inking capabilities for devices with
touch or pen input support, and a built-in password monitor to
keep your online accounts secure.
