This week's Edge Dev build brings Sleeping Tabs improvements and more

Microsoft released a new Edge Dev build, bumping the version of the browser to 94.0.975.1. This build is the second Edge 94 build for the Dev channel and brings with it a few new improvements that are aimed at enhancing the resource management features of the offering, including changes to the sleeping tabs feature and more. The firm is also listing a few improvements being made for devs and organizations, which you can read on the blog post for this week’s release.

Users can now choose to have tabs go to sleep within just one minute of inactivity, a capability that will further reduce resources consumed by inactive tabs, freeing up space for the system to utilize on other tasks. Another feature being added with this build is the ability to use PNG images for custom PWA icons for web apps installed via Edge. The new UI for installing PWAs as apps has also been made the default. Additionally, there are a few management policy additions.

Here is the complete list of features being added with this build:

• Added an option in Sleeping Tabs to put tabs to sleep after less than a minute of inactivity.
• Added how much resource savings Sleeping Tabs provide on the tab preview hover popup.
• Added support for using PNG images as the custom icons of PWAs.
• Enabled by default the ability to print to PDF in landscape layout.
• Enabled by default the improved installation dialog for PWAs/websites as apps.
• Added management policies:
  • To control if the Password Generator is Enabled
  • To control the Primary Password Setting on Mac
  • To control if Application Guard Passive Mode is Enabled, which ignores the trusted and untrusted site lists
  • To set the list to Add Edge Token To User Agent String For URLs, which is the list of sites that will see the “Edg” token appended to the UA String
• Added an option to the management policy to control Extension Settings that determines if the extension icon is pinned to the toolbar.
• Re-enabled Web Capture on Linux.

As usual, there is the usual crop of bug fixes. With these still being early version 94 builds, expect the list of fixes and improvements to grow with every release. The Redmond firm categorizes fixes in the form of reliability improvements and fixes made to address changed behavior.

Here are the reliability improvements:

• Fixed an issue where navigating to certain websites sometimes crashes the browser.
• Fixed an issue where clicking a Restart button in Settings crashes the browser.
• Fixed a crash during shutdown.
• Fixed a hang on launch.
• Fixed a crash on Android 12.
• Fixed an issue where windows become unresponsive after unplugging a monitor.

And here are all the fixes that have been made to address changed behavior:

• Fixed an issue on Mac where the Appearance Settings page is blank.
• Fixed an issue on M1 Macs where the Password Settings page is blank.
• Fixed an issue where searching in Settings causes it to go blank.
• Fixed an issue where saving a PDF sometimes fails.
• Fixed an issue on mobile where profiles are removed after installing an update.
• Fixed an issue where extensions don’t work in PWAs or websites installed as apps.
• Fixed an issue where PWAs or websites installed as apps sometimes close on their own.
• Fixed an issue where searches initiated from context menus sometimes open blank search pages instead of searching for the expected term.
• Fixed an issue where sidebar searches sometimes don’t search for the correct text.
• Fixed an issue where using touch to scroll the vertical tabs pane also changes which tab is active.
• Fixed an issue where the Efficiency Mode toolbar icon sometimes can’t be hidden.
• Fixed an issue where non-shopping websites are sometimes added to Collections as if they were shopping websites.
• Fixed an issue where Collections are unexpectedly disabled.
• Fixed an issue where the active tab sometimes changes unexpectedly when dragging tab groups.
• Fixed an issue on Android where signing into Google fails.
• Fixed an issue in WebView2 apps where controls like dropdowns sometimes don’t work because they appear behind the window instead of on top of it.
• Fixed an issue where the entire browser sometimes flashes black when watching videos while browsing another page.
• Replaced the management policy to control if the setting to Open Microsoft Links In Edge is Enabled with the policy to control if Enhanced Link Opening In Edge is Enabled.
• Obsoleted the management policy to control if User Agent Client Hints are Enabled.

As usual, there is also a list of known issues that users must be aware of. Here is the full list:

• 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 still seeing favorites get duplicated. This issue should be reduced now that automatic deduplication has been introduced into Insider channels, but we’re still rolling that out in Stable. We’ve also seen duplication happen when running the manual deduplicator on multiple machines before either machine has a chance to fully sync its changes, so make sure to leave plenty of time in between runs of the deduplicator.
• 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.

As releases are staggered and aren’t made available to everyone at once, not every user will be able to check for updates through the About Microsoft Edge page. However, the update will eventually make it to all devices and be downloaded and installed in the background.