It"s Tuesday, which means that it"s time for a new build of Microsoft"s Chromium-based Edge browser on the Dev branch. The Dev branch is updated weekly, so if you want features more quickly, you can go for the Canary branch, which is updated daily.
Today"s Edge Dev version is 77.0.211.2, and it actually contains quite a bit that"s new. It includes Read Aloud in PDFs, and a whole bunch more. Here"s the full list of new features, some of which are more major than others:
Read Aloud enabled for PDFs
Enable secure receipt of payment card data.
Enable Application Reputation from SmartScreen by default
Fix to support Dolby audio on Windows 8.
Family safety feature has a flag in edge://flags.
Direct launch for ClickOnce applications has been enabled.
Support for HEVC decoder has been added.
Enable Windows Defender Application Guard by default
Now we sort extensions into “From Microsoft Store” and “From other store” categories
Added “Recent” category in History management page
Disabled InPrivate browsing for profiles managed by Family Settings
Added tracking prevention under a flag in edge://flags.
Added ability to Save pages as MHTML from reading view
Work to support single sign on (SSO) and Azure Active Directory (AAD)
Work to support DRM in PDF
Localization into 11 languages (more coming)
Enabling SmartScreen on macOS by default
Enabling SafeSearch functionality for all Bing searches.
There is also a ton of fixes. These are the fixes for reliability:
Fix for TouchBar on macOS when in YouTube fullscreen mode.
Multiple fixes to sync engine
Improved the crash reporting and uploading
Fixed a crash on URL load
Fixed an error when sync was turned off and on repeatedly.
Fixed a crash when trying to write to a read only date attribute
Fixed a crash when moving tab between two windows on separate screens.
Fixed a crash that occurred when sync occurred before sign-on completed
Fixed a crash that occurs on some navigation requests.
Fixed a crash on pop-up windows
Fixed crash on launch of Microsoft Edge of macOS Sierra and High Sierra versions
Enabled ability to automatically repair extensions by default.
Fixed an issue with guest more support on privacy and services settings page.
Fixed crash on launch of Microsoft Edge of macOS
These are the fixes for improved behavior:
- Improvements to dark mode in various controls and pages
Select the last used Chrome profile by default when importing from Chrome.
Move multiple controls to Fluent UI
Improve the cleanup logic in the installer
Limit New Tab Page content for Education SKUs and Windows 10s.
Fixes to new WebView control rendering
Fixes for importing defaults from Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer
Fixes for Reading View toolbar
Fixes for importing pinned tabs and settings during First Run Experience
Fix to use user preference for font size rather than preset default.
Automatically move keyboard focus to address bar after First Run Experience
Fixed the swipe gesture for History on macOS
Fixed the sync icon badge on the user flyout.
Audio offload fixes to improve performance and battery life.
Most of the new features added today have been included in the daily Canary builds over the past two weeks, and there"s plenty more to come. The team noted that it"s working on adding the new IE mode soon, which will let you open a website in Internet Explorer, but in a tab within Edge.
There"s still no word on when the Beta branch will start offering builds, or when there will be native ARM64 builds, for that matter. All of that should be coming soon as well.