Microsoft: A dying Defender feature was at the heart of Edge blocking websites from loading

Bug on Windows Defender

Earlier today, we put up a story about Microsoft publishing a more detailed way of working around an issue affecting the latest Patch Tuesday update. The issue leads to installation problems as it can fail with a "0x800F0922" error code as it gets stuck around 96%.

One of our active forum members 'leonsk29' drew our attention to another issue via a comment on that article wherein the latest Stable version of Edge, 122.0.2365.63, was failing to load many websites and webpages as the Microsoft browser would display either a "not enough memory to open this page" message or a "this page is having a problem" message, with an "Out of memory" error code on both occasions. Users found that disabling extensions and add-ons or closing tabs did not help the cause.

This Out of Memory (OOM) issue seemed to be the outcome of a buggy Enhanced Web Protection implementation in the latest Edge stable version, as users on various forums online seem to have verified that disabling the Enhanced security option resolves the issue.

Microsoft probably took note of the issue after we published the news and pulled the update from its download servers.

The company has now put up a new Stable channel release that fixes the issue. In the release notes, it has confirmed that a network-related bug was preventing sites from properly loading within Microsoft Defender Application Guard (MDAG), which manifested as the OOM errors we talked about previously.

The full release notes for the latest Edge stable version, 122.0.2365.66, are given below:

Version 122.0.2365.66: March 1, 2024

Fixed various bugs and performance issues.

Fixes

Resolved a network issue that prevented sites from loading within a Microsoft Defender Application Guard window.

In case you are wondering, Microsoft Defender Application Guard or MDAG is a security feature designed to help isolate enterprise-defined untrusted sites by opening them in an isolated Hyper-V-enabled container that is separate from the host OS.

The company released the feature back in 2016 as "Windows Defender Application Guard", though it is on its way out soon as it was deprecated fairly recently.