Secret Microsoft Edge feature can preview new tabs and (surprisingly) respect your default search engine

Microsoft has shipped a ton of features to its Chromium-based browser, Microsoft Edge, over the past few months. While most of these additions are welcomed changes and are designed to enhance the browser’s user experience, several people might argue that they make it ‘bloated’.

Be it as it may, Microsoft continues to double down on its efforts to improve Microsoft Edge’s usability by shipping even more features to it. The latest addition, as spotted by the folks over at Neowin, simplifies the process of opening links in new tabs a tad easier.

The feature, dubbed Super Drag and Drop, is currently in the testing phase, thus limiting to users with the Canary and Dev preview versions of Edge. Right now, if you are running the Stable version of Edge and want to open links or images in new tabs, you’ll need to right-click on them and select the Open in new tab option in the pop-up menu.

While this seems simple enough, the new Super Drag and Drop feature simplifies the process further. Simply clicking on a link, portion of text, or even an image and dragging it a bit in any direction will open it in a new tab.

What’s more, if you’re using the feature to drag highlighted text, it will initiate a web search in a new tab. Unlike past instances where users have been forced to use Bing as the default search engine, this feature respects your set default search engine when running the web search on the highlighted text.

The feature is disabled by default, so you’ll need to navigate to the edge://flags page to access it. After restarting your browser, it will feature in Edge’s Appearance section in the Settings menu.

As it’s still in the testing phase, only two configuration options are available to users at the moment. You can configure the feature to either open tabs in the background or foreground based on your preference. It’s still unclear if Microsoft will expand this capability once the feature ships to broad availability.

Elsewhere, Microsoft is also testing a new feature in Edge Canary that will allow you to preview a link in the foreground of your tab, as spotted by Edge expert Leo Varela.

It’s a neat way to quickly check out links rather than having to switch between tabs just to check it out.

Microsoft’s script for Edge is flawed

This past month, multiple users took to social media platforms to highlight their frustrations over Microsoft gutting its loyalty award program, Microsoft Rewards. Some even harshly indicated that it was the only thing making them use Microsoft Edge.

Elsewhere, users have complained, citing the browser’s bloatedness as the main reason why they don’t “like” the browser, alongside other issues like Microsoft forcing users to use Bing as their default search engine. Just recently, Microsoft started displaying a pop-up trying to get users to switch search engines in favor of Bing.