First look at Microsoft Edge's new Web Capture tool
Microsoft added a web capture feature to the latest version of the company's Microsoft Edge Canary web browser. The Canary version of Microsoft Edge is the cutting edge development version of the browser; it receives features first before they are pushed to Edge Beta and eventually to Edge Stable.
The option to capture a screenshot of the active webpage is not a new or unique feature, the old classic Edge browser supports it, and so do other browsers such as Vivaldi or Firefox natively.
The new web capture option in Microsoft Edge Canary should be available to all users who update to the latest version. Microsoft does run a lot of A-B tests in the browser and there is a chance that some users may not see it immediately, but most should at this point.
Just right-click on a loaded site and check the context menu to find out if "Web capture" is listed as an item of the menu.
All it takes then is to select the menu option to start the capturing process. The current implementation supports rectangular screen captures only that you draw with the mouse.
Tip: you may use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-S instead to activate the web capture tool in Microsoft Edge. Another option that Edge provides is found on the edge://settings/appearance page of the browser. You may add a button to Edge's main toolbar by enabling "show web capture button" on the page. You may use the button to start a capture session from the toolbar after it has been added to it.
Microsoft Edge adds a gray overlay to the webpage in question when you active web capture to indicate that the capturing mode is active. Click and hold down the left mouse button and use the mouse to draw a rectangle on the screen. Edge captures the selected area once you let go of the left mouse button.
The browser displays two options that you may select: copy and preview. Copy copies the screenshot to the clipboard of the operating system, preview opens the image in a new overlay. It is here that you get the option to save the screenshot, to copy it to the clipboard, or to share it using the operating system's share options.
Closing Words
The capturing works well in Edge but it is very limited when compared to other implementations, e.g. that of the Firefox web browser. Firefox users may also select the screenshot option from the context menu, but get additional capture modes. Users may save the visible part of the screen or the entire web page using the screenshot tool. While Edge users may save the visible part by drawing the rectangle across it, there is no option currently to save the entire web page as an image.
It is possible that work will continue to integrate more options, e.g. full web page screenshots or note taking, or basic editing options, but Microsoft has not confirmed that at this point.
Now You: Do you find screenshot tools in browsers useful? (via Techdows)
Seems like a totally unnecessary bloat, especially when you take into account the fact that pretty much all main OSs, including windows itself, already comes with a screen capture built-in tool. And the worst part is that there’s no way of removing it, as the result of this the context menus are all bloated with options that I simply don’t use it. Like “Collections” and “”Cast Media to Device” and so on.
I see a lot of people praising the new Edge, calling it the best browser around, etc. But I have a feeling with how many bloat they’re adding, it will soon turn into Vivaldi – lots of useless features and years-long lingering issues. And then people will start disliking it.
>I see a lot of people praising the new Edge
where?
I use the Firefox screen capture quite often but also have Wolfcoders ScreenSnag installed in case I need a screenshot that is not from the browser.
Way to innovate, MS, by using someone else’s code.
@lol
Chromium is open source, if there was no intention for others to use the code, it wouldn’t be open source. It’s not hard to understand.
@ Iron Heart
They can’t make a web browser that people would want to use so they get it from Google. They can’t make a mobile os that people would want to use so they end up selling android devices and pay Samsung for having their apps pre-installed in phones. Everybody tries to find ways to uninstall their Windows apps especially Microsoft Photos. Their only successful software for consumers are windows and office because these can’t be replaced not because of they are the best of their kind in 2020, they can’t be replaced because of compability issues (they have become monopoly on these decades ago).
In 2020, it’s a software giant my a$$.
@Anonymous
My comment is unrelated to the end result in terms of quality. If you think Edge or any Microsoft product is bad, then so be it. Just sometimes, reinventing the wheel doesn’t make sense. Chromium is open source and widely used, Microsoft was foolish for not having done this earlier.
PS: That MS Office is supposedly worse than its competitors really is a matter of debate, the rest I agree with, though.
So cutting edge of them to write it from the ground up themselves. Oh, wait, they didn’t! From Google? What? HAHHAhahhaahhHAHHAH!
@no censor my posties
Yeah, because reinventing the wheel worked out so well for them last time (old MS Edge)…
So, to conclude:
1. you can now screenshot parts of the visible website. completely unnecessary and redundant as you can just use snip&sketch, snipping tool, spectacle and other built-in screenshot applets
2. you still cannot take a full-page screenshot, which would be useful
3. you still cannot do website annotation, even though old edge supported it and it was one of the features that was supposed to set it apart from the competition
I use Greenshot, simple utility with ancient interface. No point in replication in a browser especially since the browser tool won’t work anywhere else and Greenshot ( or any other clip utility I’ve used) works everywhere.