Microsoft has outlined its plans for the next stage of development for the new Chromium-based Edge browser, and those plans include a trio of new features.

The first is a big nod to enterprise customers: a built-in Internet Explorer mode. Chrome has a number of extensions that accomplish much the same thing—they create a new tab in the browser and use the Internet Explorer 11 engine, rather than the Chrome engine, to draw that tab. For Edge, this capability will be built in.

Enterprises can already create a compatibility list, the Enterprise Mode Site List, which the current Edge browser uses to know which (internal, line-of-business) sites should be shown in Internet Explorer 11. The new Edge will use this same list to determine when to use Internet Explorer.

Second, Microsoft is building a new privacy dashboard for the browser. This will allow privacy-related settings to be controlled together to provide three different levels of privacy—unrestricted, balanced, and strict—which will control things such as how aggressively the browser limits tracking cookies, ad personalization, and so on. The strict option is so restrictive that it might break sites, and even the unrestricted option says that it will block known-malicious trackers.

Finally, and most vaguely, Microsoft intends to add a feature it's calling Collections. This looks similar to Firefox Pocket or perhaps even Google Keep: a way of saving pages, or fragments of pages, in named collections. Microsoft intends to make this intelligent—for example, creating a collection for a shopping list, then exporting that data to Excel, which can then be used to sort the list by price.

All three new features are expected to be released in preview over the coming months.

Listing image by @AndreTelevise