As it usually does on Tuesdays, Microsoft has released a new build of the Chromium-based Edge browser to users testing it in the Dev channel. Just as it promised last week, this is the first release based on Chromium 91, and it carries build number 91.0.825.0.
Builds that jump to a new Chromium version often don"t include a ton of new additions, but there are some notable improvements in this release. For instance, Edge"s Immersive Reader will now work better on Wikipedia, with support for the built-in table of contents. This is still rolling out, so you may not see it right away, but there are a handful of other additions this week:
- Finished rolling out on-demand password generation from the context menu.
- Improved Read Aloud to skip extraneous content on some webpages.
- Added a management policy to control if New Tab Page Quick Links are Enabled. Note that updates to documentation or administrative templates may not be available yet.
- Enabled the Chromium management policy to control Fetch Keepalive Duration On Shutdown.
Aside from the additions, there are also some bug fixes and minor improvements, which Microsoft splits into behavior and reliability lists. The fixes for improved reliability include:
- Fixed a crash on launch.
- Fixed a crash when searching from the context menu.
- Fixed an issue where the Browser Task Manager sometimes crashes the browser.
- Fixed an issue where Edge doesn’t launch on devices that have certain VMware software installed. For more information, see https://community.carbonblack.com/t5/Knowledge-Base/Carbon-Black-Cloud-MS-Edge-Failure-to-launch-aft....
- Fixed an issue where pinning the Web Widget sometimes crashes it.
As for changes in the browser"s behavior, we have a much longer list:
- Fixed an issue where Edge sometimes launches to a new profile if the shortcut used to launch it doesn’t specify what profile to use, causing users to think their data is gone even though it’s not.
- Fixed an issue on Linux where push notifications from websites don’t work.
- Fixed an issue where smooth scrolling doesn’t work on certain devices. Note that this fix reverts back to prior scroll behavior, which will likely regress recently fixed behavior for other users. Work in this area is ongoing to provide a flag to enable on-demand switching between old and new behavior in order to provide all users with a way to ensure correct device-agnostic scrolling behavior.
- Fixed an issue where certain permission request prompts from websites are blank or missing text.
- Fixed an issue where the button to switch to an existing tab when an address is typed in the address bar that matches the address of an existing tab sometimes doesn’t appear at certain window sizes.
- Fixed an issue where duplicate Edge shortcuts sometimes appear on the Start menu.
- Fixed an issue where PWAs or websites installed as apps that are open in one Edge channel are sometimes unexpectedly closed when another Edge channel installs an update.
- Fixed an issue where the context menu option to translate a page doesn’t do anything if the page is already translated.
- Fixed an issue where browser themes sometimes cause the window control buttons to disappear.
- Fixed an issue where the dialog for manually importing browser data sometimes doesn’t go away.
- Fixed an issue where IE mode tabs sometimes aren’t scaled or zoomed properly.
- Fixed an issue where certain websites can’t be selected when using the Pinning Wizard.
- Fixed an issue where Smart Copy sometimes doesn’t copy all selected content if some of the selected area is scrolled offscreen.
- Fixed an issue where keyboard shortcuts to switch tabs in Kiosk mode sometimes don’t work.
- Fixed an issue where the window title for the Web Widget Taskbar icon is blank.
- Fixed an issue where certain buttons in the Web Widget sometimes aren’t visible.
As you should expect from any pre-release software, there are some known issues with this build. These include being unable to play videos on some websites when you"re using ad-blocking extensions. Here"s the full list:
- Certain extensions such as the Microsoft Editor extension don’t work on Linux. As soon as they’re installed, they crash and are disabled. We’re currently investigating.
- Users of certain ad blocking extensions may experience playback errors on Youtube. As a workaround, temporarily disabling the extension should allow playback to proceed. See this help article for more details.
- Some users are still running into an issue where all tabs and extensions immediately crash with a STATUS_INVALID_IMAGE_HASH error. The most common cause of this error is outdated security or antivirus software from vendors like Symantec, and in those cases, updating that software will fix it.
- Users of the Kaspersky Internet Suite who have the associated extension installed may sometimes see webpages like Gmail fail to load. This failure is due to the main Kaspersky software being out of date, and is thus fixed by making sure the latest version is installed.
- Some users are still seeing favorites get duplicated. This issue should be reduced now that automatic deduplication has been introduced into Insider channels, but we’re still rolling that out in Stable. We’ve also seen duplication happen when running the manual deduplicator on multiple machines before either machine has a chance to fully sync its changes, so make sure to leave plenty of time in between runs of the deduplicator.
- Some users are seeing “wobbling” behavior when scrolling using trackpad gestures or touchscreens, where scrolling in one dimension also causes the page to subtly scroll back and forth in the other. Note that this only affects certain websites and seems to be worse on certain devices. This is most likely related to our ongoing work to bring scrolling back to parity with Edge Legacy’s behavior, so if this behavior is undesirable, you can temporarily turn it off by disabling the edge://flags/#edge-experimental-scrolling flag.
If you"re already running Edge Dev, the update should download and install automatically for you. Otherwise, you can download the latest version of the browser from the Microsoft Edge Insider website.