Originally announced at its Build 2019 developer conference back in May, Microsoft"s Collections feature is now available in its Edge browser through the Canary branch. It"s designed to allow you to put things you find on the web into separate groups, as the name Collections implies. The version of the feature that you"ll see in Edge Canary is an early one, so it"s meant to change over time based on the feedback that Microsoft collects.
Using Collections is pretty simple. First, you need to turn it on in a flag by going to Edge://flags, searching for Collections, and enabling it. Once you have it on, you"ll see a new icon to the right of the URL bar.
From there, you can choose to start a new Collection. The first option you"ll be given is to add the current page you"re on, but you can do more than that. You can drag and drop images, text, and links from the websites that you"re visiting. Or, you can right-click on the content and add it to a Collection via the context menu.
And of course, you can edit your collection in various ways, by adding notes to it, rearranging it, or removing items. If you want to, you can even export your Collection to Excel, and the result will include information that"s extracted from websites that you visit. For example, if you saved a bunch of products from Amazon, it will show the name of the product and the price. Exporting is only available for Windows 10 and macOS right now, but it"s coming to Windows 7 and Windows 8.x soon.
If you want to try out the new feature, you can download Edge Canary here.