Microsoft is keeping up with its usual release schedule for new builds of the Edge browser in the Dev channel of the Insider program, and today we"re getting version number 88.0.692.0. This release is a pretty small one, and there isn"t a lot that"s noteworthy.
The most notable change is that you can now pin websites to your Start menu in this release. You could already create web apps and pin them, but this way you can just pin websites that open in a regular Edge window. The option can be found in the ellipsis menu under the "More tools" dropdown near the bottom. Aside from that, there"s only a couple of additions this week:
- Enabled support for Guided Switch on Mac.
- Added the ability for Kiosk Mode to open all popups in new tabs instead of windows.
Of course, as with every other build, there are some fixes and improvements, but those lists are also fairly short this week. Starting with reliability improvements:
- Fixed a crash on launch when Edge is set to restore the previous session.
- Fixed an issue where uninstalling a website installed as an app sometimes crashes the browser.
- Fixed a crash when opening certain PDFs.
- Fixed a crash when syncing Collections.
- Fixed a hang during navigation.
- Fixed an issue where some PDFs opened straight from the internet fail to load.
As for the behavior-related fixes:
- Fixed an issue where webpages sometimes flicker or flash constantly.
- Fixed an issue where the button to close an InPrivate window doesn’t work.
- Fixed an issue where work or school users sometimes don’t see the personalization or changes away from the default that they expect to see on the new tab page.
- Fixed an issue where the Force Sync management policy didn’t work when using on-premises profiles.
- Fixed an issue where the new tab page shows an error that “Something is wrong” when certain management policies are applied.
- Fixed an issue where pages sometimes don’t have images properly added to their entries in a Collection.
There are also a few known issues, as per usual. Here"s what you might run into:
- 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 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.
Since the Dev channel is a couple of versions ahead of the stable release of Edge, it will probably be a while before we see these features make their way to everyone. New major releases come every six weeks, and the last release was three weeks ago, when version 87 was promoted to the Beta channel and version 86 to the stable channel.