Try Out Focus Mode in Chromium-Based Microsoft Edge Browser

While at first glance it looks like Microsoft is replacing EdgeHTML in Microsoft Edge browser with Chromium because the company can’t build its very own advanced engine, this migration comes with a series of benefits for the software giant and its users.

And one of them is that the features already available in Google Chrome would technically be available for the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser too.

As I said on several occasions, this begins with support for extensions. At this point, Google Chrome has the largest collection of extensions out there, so once it lands with support for Chromium, Microsoft Edge would become fully compatible with these add-ons as well.

In addition to extensions, the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge will also support additional features, including here the recently-spotted focus mode.

Not a long time ago, I told you that Google was developing a focus mode for Chrome and shared instructions on how to enable this feature before its official release.

And according to the ones mentioned above, the focus mode will work in Microsoft Edge as well once the transition to Chromium is complete.

What is focus mode?

While Google hasn’t publicly announced focus mode and its purpose, the existing implementation in Chromium and the new Microsoft Edge provides us with a glimpse into its functionality.

Basically, focus mode is nothing like the Focus assist feature in Windows 10 and which blocks notifications when running full-screen apps. In fact, the Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge focus mode is supposed to launch a specific tab in its very own dedicated window without any other controls.

While at first glance this doesn’t make sense, it does when thinking about focusing on just a specific website without closing the others.

The best example is probably the moment when you’re reading a longer article and you just want to keep one page in focus. Right-clicking this tab and triggering focus mode should allow you to do this easily.

How to enable it in Microsoft Edge

Because it’s based on Chromium, Microsoft Edge comes with focus mode too, and obviously, the steps to enable it are very similar to the ones in Chrome.

First and foremost, launch the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge and in the address bar, type the following command:

The next time the browser launches, you should see a new option in the tab context menu (when right-clicking a browser in Microsoft Edge). This will let you launch a specific tab in focus mode and thus read the content without any other options in the window.

At this point, both the focus mode and the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser are a work in progress, so they should improve in the coming weeks before they become available to everyone.

Microsoft Edge itself is expected to hit the shelves as a preview browser shortly, as Microsoft originally announced an early installer in the first months of 2019. The version that I’ve used for this tutorial is a leaked build, but it already works pretty smoothly, which itself is an indication that the release of the preview version is just around the corner.