Continuing a string of various, more or less useful updates, Microsoft Edge has introduced the ability to follow creators directly in the browser. When vising creator profiles on supported sites, the browser temporarily shows a prompt in the address bar to ‘Follow’ said username; after the prompt fades, it leaves behind a permanent button to follow/unfollow next to the Favorites star. By default you will receive notifications whenever these creators post new content via a popup next to the Collections button. From this popup you can navigate to the new post, snooze the notification, or manage these updates in a separate sidebar. The browser also added two new settings entries to control the feature, available in the section ‘Privacy, search, and services’: here you can enable or disable both the notifications and the address bar prompts to follow new creators.
Unfortunately, despite being launched in the stable channel since summer and in testing from the beginning of the year, the feature doesn’t seem fully developed to me. For starters, as far as I can tell you can only follow video creators on YouTube – some articles report that TikTok and BiliBili work as well, but I’m not using TikTok and have never heard of BiliBili, nor do I particularly care to. Even on YouTube it seems not every channel is included, as from my limited tests the address bar ‘Follow’ button doesn’t activate on some profiles – no idea what triggers this or if it’s something individual YouTube creators can control. The button doesn’t show up on my own YouTube channel for example, though I haven't uploaded anything in years. I also find the choice of integrating this into Collections rather odd, since I view Collections as a place to gather and organize links and other various bits of information, not as a destination for content discovery.
Its readiness aside, I’m not convinced the feature can ever become useful beyond very casual users following a modest set of creators. This is a far cry from a full-fledged RSS reader, especially at the current stage of being basically a glorified YouTube notifier. Following an increasing number of creators will quickly drown users in multiple notifications about their latest posts to the point most people will either ignore these notifications or turn them off entirely – and, once that happens, good luck convincing them to hunt down the creators sidebar somewhere in the browser settings. I also don’t see much incentive to continue adding support for news sites or other sources. Users have plenty of places to read news, and Microsoft itself operates a news aggregator; what’s the point of spending developer resources to build this feature into a browser, and possibly to persuade sites to support it?
For me at least, this feature leans heavily into the bloat category, which is not a good direction for future development… A recent announcement talked about plans to bring DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s AI-powered system that generates images from text, into Edge as well, another sign of accumulating bloat and building features that increasingly smaller groups of people would find valuable.
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