Like any other mainstream browser, Microsoft Edge offers a built-in PDF reader to view and edit PDF documents. Over the last year, the developers brought lots of new features to this tool, and Microsoft continues working on new ones. Today the company revealed new capabilities coming soon to PDF reader in Microsoft Edge.
Microsoft Edge already supports a variety of features for PDF reading. For example, table of contents, page view, caret mode, forms support, accessibility, ink annotation, text notes, highlighting, read aloud, and dictionary search. More to come.
Upcoming features
Currently, Microsoft is working on view recovery. This feature will make sure you re-open a document where you left it off.
Also, Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) file protection support and certificate-based digital signatures validation are coming soon to Edge. With these features, users will have an option to view protected PDFs within their organizations. You can expect these updates to land somewhere in the near future.
Later, the developers will bring PDF previews for File Explorer and Outlook, text boxes for forms, labels preview for protected files, additional digital signatures support, and various accessibility improvements. The latter include enhancements for filling forms and navigation using different screen readers.
In their blog post, Microsoft did note that many different PDF reader features are the results of users' extensive feedback. The company encourages you to share your opinion about existing and incoming capabilities. You can send your feedback using the Help and Feedback – Send feedback in the browser's main menu.
Microsoft Edge is a relatively new browser to the market. Still, fast development allows Edge to keep up with mainstream browsers and even outcompete them in many aspects. After the fiasco with Edge "Spartan" built on EdgeHTML, Microsoft ditched its proprietary rendering engine and opted for the mainstream Chromium. This change allowed the company to speed up the development and significantly improve the compatibility. Also, Chromium made possible Edge on macOS, older Windows versions, and even Linux.
Microsoft is about to drop Edge Legacy support on March 9, 2021. In April, the company will remove the old browser from Windows 10 altogether, leaving only several bits of web technologies required for the apps to continue operating.
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