Edge Dev gets natural language support for search in history

An illustration of developers working on improving the Edge browser

With Microsoft getting ready to release Edge 102 in the Beta and Stable channel, Edge 103 is moving from Canary to Dev. The first 103 release is now available for testing in this week's Dev update. Version 103.0.1253.0 is a relatively minor update, with the most significant new feature being support for a natural voice for search in history. You can open the history flyout and type something similar to "YouTube from last week".

In case you missed it, in the previous Edge Dev update, Microsoft added support for the Clarity Boost feature that improves the image quality when streaming games from the cloud.

What is new in Microsoft Edge Dev 103.0.1253.0?

Added features:

Added the ability to pin PWA/websites installed as apps to the taskbar from their … menus.

Enabled by default the ability to search in the History popup using natural language (for example, “Youtube from last week”).

Added a management policy to set the Internet Explorer mode Zoom Display type, which controls if the browser’s zoom level takes into account the current display scale like IE used to (for example, if display scaling is set to 150%, then IE’s default zoom level would show 150%). Note that updates to documentation and administrative templates may not have occurred yet.

Improved reliability:

Fixed a crash on launch.

Fixed a crash when visiting certain websites.

Fixed a crash when adding items to Collections.

Fixed a crash when switching profiles in the Edge Bar.

Fixed a crash in WebView2 applications when adding Status Bar text (Issue 2414).

Changed behavior:

Temporarily disabled the search box in the Alerts and Tips popup.

Fixed an issue where the browser sometimes doesn’t respond to links clicked from other applications if it’s not already open.

Fixed an issue where the browser isn’t brought into the foreground if it’s minimized when clicking on a notification in the Windows Action Center.

Fixed an issue where previously-opened tabs are sometimes restored when first opening the browser even though they’re not supposed to be.

Fixed an issue where vertical tabs are improperly colored when using custom themes.

Fixed an issue where the Find on Page UI is red.

Fixed an issue where navigator.mediaCapabilities sometimes doesn’t report proper decodingInfo to websites.

Fixed an issue where app or popup windows opened from IE mode tabs don’t automatically resize when they’re supposed to.

Fixed an issue in WebView2 apps where the on-screen keyboard sometimes doesn’t appear (Issue 460).

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 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 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.