Microsoft reveals some new text editing features that have been put in the Edge web browser

Last week, Microsoft released the latest version of its Edge web browser, 124, for all users in the Stable channel. The latest version has quite a few new features, including some new ways for users to edit text inside the browser.

In a post on the Microsoft Edge blog, the company says that while modern web browsers like Edge can support things like editing documents, writing code and emails, and more, there have been some limitations to what they can do.

However, Microsoft has been working on new text editing features that have found their way to recent Microsoft Edge stable editions. Some of those features have also been made available for Chromium-based browsers as well.

Two of the features are exclusive to Edge. One is adding Edge's Compose feature to help rewrite editable text in a document inside the browser with the use of Microsoft's Copilot. Microsoft says:

Select a section of text that’s displayed in an editable field and click the Copilot icon to start rewriting that section, by iterating through different AI-generated proposals.You can change the tone, format, or length settings to your needs.

Another new feature that's exclusive to Edge is support for Windows Ink for digital writing in places like the browser's address bar, text area and input elements, and areas with the "contenteditable" attribute. Users can do things like delete digital writing by scribbling over words, add or remove spaces between words by drawing vertical lines, and more,

Some other text editing features have been recently introduced in both Edge and other Chromium-based browsers. One is the EditContext API, which lets users create their own text editors inside supported browsers.

Another recently introduced API now lets users who want to copy and paste HTML formatted text to web apps "to choose when they want to receive the full HTML content, rather than a browser-sanitized version of the HTML." Microsoft says this new API has already solved some issues when cutting and pasting text into the Excel web app.

Finally, with the release of Edge 124, there's also the new HTML attribute called "writingsuggestions". It turns off text prediction for any editable part of a web page. While this is an Edge exclusive at the moment, it may appear on other Chromium-based browsers.

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