Microsoft has been telegraphing this one for a while, but the actual execution date snuck up fast. In the latest Edge Canary builds, the Sidebar app list and the Collections feature — Edge’s built-in tool for saving and organizing links with notes — are simply gone.
The company’s word for this is “simplifying.” That’s corporate-speak for removing a feature people used, to make room for something else.
What Collections Actually Did, and Who Relied on It
Collections launched in 2019 as Edge’s answer to a common problem: saving a group of related links — recipe ingredients, travel research, shopping comparisons, articles for a work project — without cluttering the bookmarks bar with a dozen loose entries. You could drag a page into a Collection, add a note next to it, export the whole thing to a Word or Excel file, and come back to it as a self-contained unit rather than digging through folders.
That made it genuinely different from shared bookmarks. A bookmark just stores a link. A Collection stored the link, a screenshot or note about why you saved it, and kept the whole set exportable as one document. For people doing research-heavy work — trip planning, price comparisons, project scoping — that distinction mattered enough that Collections built a real, if quiet, following over six years.
What Got Cut, and How Fast
The warning arrived first: tapping the “+” button on the sidebar in the stable build now triggers a blunt notification that the sidebar app list is being retired starting with Edge 149. New app pins are already blocked. Anything already pinned keeps working for now, but it gets wiped out the moment Edge 149 ships.
Collections is getting the identical treatment on the same timeline. On Edge Canary, which previews what’s coming, the removal is already complete — the sidebar’s app tower is gone, the Collections shortcut is missing from the toolbar, and the settings toggle that used to control sidebar behavior (always on, auto-hide, off) has been deleted from the Appearance menu entirely.
The One Thing Microsoft Made Sure Wasn’t Touched
Buried in the same update: Microsoft explicitly noted that “Copilot is not affected by this change, and we’re continuing to improve and enhance it.” Two features that let people save and organize links are being cut. The AI assistant is untouched and expanding.
That’s not a coincidence so much as a stated priority. Microsoft’s own release notes confirm the removal outright as of Edge Stable 149, with the only guidance being to export saved content or move pages to Favorites before updating.
How to Get Your Collections Out Before They Disappear
If you have active Collections, the export function still works in current stable Edge: open a Collection, use the “…” menu, and choose “Send to Excel” or “Send to Word” to save the contents as a document before the feature is retired. This is the one step worth doing now rather than after Edge 149 lands, since there’s no indication the export tool survives the removal alongside everything else.
