As is customary every week, Microsoft has released a new Edge Dev build, bumping up the version to 87.0.658.0. Today’s release again brings a small number of feature additions such as the ability to select specific text and translate it on a webpage, set the browser to never translate sites depending on the users’ preference, and a couple of management policies.
The Redmond giant has also included links to posts that detail other recent additions to the Dev and Canary channels of the browser, such as the new Web capture tool, PDF improvements, and more. The last few builds have been light on features, bringing nifty features such as dark theme in sidebar search and enhancements to copying URLs from the browser.
Here is the list of features added to the browser in this build:
- Added the ability to translate selected text on a page.
- Added the ability to never translate a particular site.
- Added a management policy to Configure Speech Recognition. Note that updates to documentation and administrative templates are still needed.
- Obsoleted the management policy to Enable Deprecated Web Platform Features.
There are the usual set of fixes to improve the reliability of the browser, including fixes for crashes. Here is the complete list:
- Fixed an issue where opening Edge sometimes causes the device to bluescreen.
- Fixed an issue where opening the Downloads management page sometimes crashes the browser.
- Fixed a crash when opening a website installed as an app.
- Fixed a crash when Password Monitor shows an alert.
- Fixed an issue where using certain accessibility features like Narrator sometimes causes tabs to crash on certain versions of Windows 10.
- Fixed an issue where dragging items into a Collection sometimes crashes the Collections pane.
- Fixed an issue where Edge sometimes opens many command prompt windows with ERROR: file_io_win.cc(180).
And then there is the list of improvements made to address changed behavior:
- Temporarily disabled the cards that appear when hovering the mouse over tabs.
- Fixed an issue where there is sometimes blank space between tabs or between the new tab button and the last tab.
- Fixed an issue where Read Aloud sometimes doesn’t start reading from the current location in PDFs.
- Fixed an issue where the profile image on the Taskbar shortcut doesn’t match the image in the browser.
- Fixed an issue where searching on the History management page sometimes doesn’t work.
- Fixed an issue where using Guided Switch opens an additional new tab.
- Fixed an issue where Guided Switch sometimes is triggered for popup windows.
- Fixed an issue where text selected in PDFs sometimes doesn’t unselect when it should.
- Fixed an issue where keyboard shortcuts registered by extensions sometimes don’t work.
Lastly, the list of known issues includes a bunch of items that have persisted across builds, including issues such as duplicated favorites and YouTube playback errors. Here is the complete list of the known issues that users should be aware of:
- 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, today’s update should be made available automatically to users running the Dev channel builds. Users can also head to Settings > About Microsoft Edge to check for updates. For those running the stable version of the Edge browser, version 86 should begin rolling out sometime this week.
