Microsoft today posted its November iteration of the new “What’s new in Web Experiences” series of blogs, detailing a whole bunch of features making it to the browser this month. These include a number of shopping features geared towards the upcoming holiday season, PDF improvements, and more.
First up are the enhancements being made to improve shopping, building on the additions made last month. The first in the list is a new coupons feature on both desktop and mobile – currently limited to iOS – that automatically surfaces any available coupons on a retailer’s website. Clicking the blue shopping tag at the end of the address bar provides a list of available options for that retailer. The feature also helps compare prices automatically between multiple retailers, saving users the effort to look through multiple websites. These features can be turned off through the settings.
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Another addition is the new ‘Deals’ feature on the new tab page. Users can hit the plus sign on the new tab and turn on the feature from the Top sites list to get “up-to-the-minute retailer discounts”. The new tab page also features voice search now. The price comparison and Deals features are currently restricted to users in the U.S.
There are also new features in Bing for some regions that make it easier to shop during the holidays. These include the updated Deals and new Shopping hubs for offers from brands organized by categories. There’s also a new Shop the Look feature that uses visual search technologies to curate listing for items based on users’ searches. The Shopping tab can also show comprehensive product details for select products, for which users can choose to track the price and add to their wish lists.
As for the browser itself, the new Web Capture feature is being made available this month. The feature lets users capture screenshots of webpages and annotate or draw on them, something that was a sought-after capability in legacy Edge. The firm will be adding the ability to capture screenshots of the entire webpage later in the month, which is currently being tested in the Canary and Dev channels. The browser is also adding support for text notes in PDFs to highlighted text. Lastly, there is a new tab page experience for Enterprise users, which will roll out with version 87 slated for release this week.
Other improvements making their way to Edge include a new copy-paste experience for pasting links, letting users paste website links as plain text to reduce clutter. The firm is also touting improvements made to Microsoft News via the Edge browser on the Surface Duo, with support for the dual displays built into the Launcher and News for an enhanced reading experience.
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