It"s Tuesday, and as usual, it"s time for a new build of Microsoft"s Edge browser in the Dev channel. Today"s build is version 88.0.685.3. Also, there"s not much that"s new, and Microsoft leads off its post by saying that it"s a "quiet week" this week.
There are two new features, both of which are minor. One is support for pre-rendered new tab pages on Linux, and the other is "Mac support for the management policy to Configure Friendly URL Format". If you"re using the browser on Windows, then there"s absolutely nothing new for you inn this build.
That doesn"t mean that there"s nothing to try out though. Last week, the firm launched vertical tabs for the Dev and Canary channels, so that"s something that you can play around with. Also, history sync is finally showing up in the Canary channel, so that"s a server-side change that should be happening soon in the Dev channel.
Of course, there are also fixes and known issues. Here"s what got fixed for improved reliability:
- Fixed an issue where Edge won’t open and gives an error message about a bad image or a missing msedge.dll.
- Fixed a crash on launch when favorites sync is enabled.
- Fixed an issue where certain browser profile names will cause Edge to crash on launch.
- Fixed an issue where installing a website as an app and then clicking Edge’s … menu sometimes causes a crash.
- Fixed a crash when using Application Guard.
- Fixed a crash when closing the browser.
- Fixed an issue where certain websites like Outlook sometimes fail to load and give an error that “something went wrong”.
Here are the fixes for changed behavior:
- Fixed an issue where the prompt to restore tabs after Edge unexpectedly exits does nothing if history is set to be deleted when the browser is closed. Note that this fix disables the popup entirely.
- Fixed an issue where the Security section in Settings is missing.
- Fixed an issue where the setting to clear cookies when closing the browser sometimes ignores exceptions and clears cookies that it’s not expected to.
- Fixed an issue where data that’s supposed to be cleared when the browser is closed sometimes isn’t.
- Fixed an issue where some PDFs initially render all black or blank when opened.
- Fixed an issue where web captures can sometimes be closed unintentionally.
- Fixed an issue where copying web captures sometimes fails.
- Fixed an issue where initiating a web capture sometimes removes any text highlighting on a page.
- Fixed an issue where some parts of a web capture sometimes can’t be inked on.
- Fixed an issue where webpage zoom levels sometimes cause the Favorites menu to be zoomed as well.
- Fixed an issue where webpages sometimes don’t zoom in as much as they should be able to.
- Fixed an issue where the certificate selection popup sometimes isn’t shown in IE mode tab.
Finally, here are the known issues:
- 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 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/known-issue-adblock-causing-errors-on-youtube/m-p/14... 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 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.
- 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. For users with discrete GPUs, updating graphics drivers may help.
- 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 usual, you can manually update your browser by going to Settings -> About Microsoft Edge. If you don"t, the browser will update itself in the background at some point.