Microsoft’s annual Build conference starts today and with it come a whole host of announcements. In the midst of all the announcements, including for features coming to Microsoft Edge, the company is also delivering its weekly Edge Dev build, with build 84.0.516.1 now rolling out to users in the Dev branch.
Today’s build is minor with some UI improvements to the media casting feature while it is disabled and the addition of a Website Permissions Settings page “for when “a website wants to access serial ports’. The blog post also mentions the addition of support for quieter notifications in the settings page, something that has been available since version 83.
Here is the list of new features in today’s release:
- Added UI to help enable media casting if users attempt to use it while it’s disabled. Note that casting is currently only supported via ChromeCast devices.
- Added support for quieter notifications in edge://settings/content/notifications.
- Improved the UI when picking a certificate to use for website authentication.
- Added a Website Permissions Settings page for when a website wants to access serial ports.
In addition to the new features, there are the usual fixes. Here is the list of fixes for improved reliability:
- Fixed a crash when typing in the address bar.
- Fixed a crash when closing the browser.
- Fixed an issue where opening an Application Guard window sometimes crashes the browser.
- Fixed an issue where IE mode doesn’t work or tries to launch IE as its own window instead of inside an Edge tab.
- Fixed an issue where running Edge’s installer for the same version that’s currently installed while the browser is open corrupts the installation.
- Fixed an issue where favorites sometimes aren’t synced.
- Improved the reliability of the account picture appearing properly next to the … menu for work and school accounts, especially after changing it.
There are also a host of fixes for changed behavior. Here’s the list:
- Changed Shy UI to only invoke when the mouse is at the very top of the screen instead of just near it.
- Fixed an issue where the Immersive Reader toolbar sometimes is blank.
- Fixed an issue where the deletion of certain browsing data like passwords sometimes isn’t synced to other devices until Edge is restarted.
- Fixed an issue where the Passwords Settings page is blank on Mac.
- Changed password autofill behavior to no longer autofill passwords if there are multiple possible passwords. Instead, the correct password must be selected.
- Fixed an issue where passwords can’t be copied out of Settings once they’ve been shown.
- Fixed an issue where clicking in the empty space of the Downloads management page scrolls it back to the top.
- Fixed an issue where clicking in the empty space of the History or Favorites management pages scrolls them back to the top.
- Fixed an issue where Spellcheck sometimes flags all words as misspelled when they’re written in a language that’s different than the underlying OS language.
- Improved detection of prices in foreign currencies when adding items to a Collection.
- Fixed an issue where pasting content from a Collections text note with a colored background doesn’t preserve the background color wherever it’s pasted.
- Improved error messaging when browser sign-in fails.
As with all releases, there are a bunch of known issues that users need to be aware of. Here is the list of all the known issues in today’s release:
- Tabs sometimes appear squished or too small, even when there are only a few of them. This is most often caused by clicking a link in a different program that opens a new tab in Edge, and can usually be fixed by changing the size of the tab band, for example by resizing the window.
- 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 seeing favorites get duplicated after we made some previous fixes in that area. The most common way this is triggered is by installing the Stable channel of Edge and then signing into it with an account that has already signed into Edge before. Fixing this should be easier now that the deduplicator tool is available. However, we’ve also seen duplication happen when running the deduplicator on multiple machines before either machine has a chance to fully sync its changes, so while we wait for some of the fixes we’ve made to come to Stable, make sure to leave plenty of time in between runs of the deduplicator. We hope that this will be improved now that version 81 is released to Stable.
- After an initial fix for it recently, some users are still experiencing Edge windows becoming all black. Opening the Browser Task Manager (keyboard shortcut is shift + esc) and killing the GPU process usually fixes it. Note that this only appears to affect users with certain hardware and is most easily triggered by resizing an Edge window.
- 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.
- There are some issues where users with multiple audio output devices sometimes don’t get any sound from Edge. In one case, Edge becomes muted in the Windows Volume Mixer and unmuting it fixes it. In another, restarting the browser fixes it.
As always, today’s update should be made available to users automatically. You can head to the ellipsis menu > Help and feedback > About Microsoft Edge to check for updates and force start the download. Since the rollout has just begun, it is possible that the update will not show up immediately for all users.
Those in the Beta channel may have to wait longer for Edge 84, since the last update that bumped it up to version 83 was released on April 22 and the builds for this channel go out every six weeks.