As we've been accustomed to on Tuesdays, Microsoft has released a new build of the Chromium-based Edge browser to users enrolled in the Dev channel of the Insider program. It's a big release, as Microsoft already announced that Dev builds now natively support ARM-powered devices like the Surface Pro X, as well as new capabilities like support for Windows high contrast themes and more immersive reader options.
But even in addition to that, there are a couple of new features with build 80.0.361.5. Microsoft says you'll see a "pinning wizard", which will suggest that you pin some of your frequent websites to the taskbar. You can also access the pinning wizard from the browser's menu, under "More Tools". Here's what else is new:
- Added support for Dolby Vision playback.
- Enabled users of Windows Mixed Reality to view 360° videos on VR headsets.
In addition to the new features, this week's release also comes with a slew of fixes and improvements. For reliability, Microsoft has fixed a number of crashes related to PDFs, Collections, and the Surf game, in addition to other fixes:
- Fixed a crash when opening certain PDFs.
- Fixed an issue where clicking on the Feedback button crashes the browser.
- Fixed a browser crash for users of Collections.
- Fixed a crash when closing the browser.
- Fixed an issue where typing passwords into password fields sometimes causes a tab crash.
- Fixed a crash when playing the Surf game.
- Fixed an issue where certain websites don’t load properly.
- Fixed an issue where Netflix playback fails for certain videos with error D7381.
Finaly, for bheavior changes, Microsoft has changed Favorites folders to now have a yellow icon, updated the built-in Adobe Flash plug-in, and much more:
- By request, favorites folders are now yellow.
- Updated Adobe Flash to version 32.0.0.303.
- Fixed an issue where PDFs that fail to save for some reason end up failing silently instead of showing an error to the user.
- Fixed an issue where the font dropdown in Settings doesn’t work.
- Fixed an issue where the search engine can’t be edited because the Save button doesn’t work.
- Fixed an issue where the current display language can be removed from Edge even though it shouldn’t be.
- Fixed an issue where Edge installations on Azure Active Directory domain-joined machines get signed into the wrong account on first run.
- Fixed an issue where some webpages aren’t able to be translated, and instead show an error saying that the source language and target language are the same.
- Fixed an issue where Learn More links clicked during the First Run Experience open in tabs hidden behind the FRE instead of in a dialog above it.
- Fixed an issue where navigation to certain websites in IE mode sometimes fails.
- Fixed an issue where adding an item to a Collection sometimes doesn’t load the image properly and instead shows the loading spinner forever.
- Fixed an issue where pasting items from one Collection into another doesn’t paste them in the correct order.
- Fixed an issue where dragging and dropping an image into a Collection sometimes results in the wrong link being saved.
- Fixed an issue where feedback screenshots sometimes don’t work properly on Mac.
- Fixed an issue where the keyboard shortcut for saving a PDF doesn’t work on Mac.
- Fixed an issue where desktop notifications are broken on Windows Insider builds.
- Fixed an issue where Edge sometimes fails to automatically update on Windows Insider builds.
- Fixed an issue where uninstalling and reinstalling Edge sometimes results in it no longer being able to launch on Windows Insider builds.
As you'd expect, though, there are still some known issues in this release. The list is somewhat extensive this week:
- Navigation in new tabs sometimes fails, either showing an error that the connection is closed, or crashing the tab. In some cases, subsequent navigations in the tab are okay.
- After an initial fix for it recently, some users are still experiencing Edge windows becoming all black. UI popups like menus are not affected, and opening the Browser Task Manager (keyboard shortcut is shift+esc) and killing the GPU process fixes it.
- Highlighting text in the address bar then clicking on webpages sometimes causes black-on-dark text when the browser is in Dark Theme.
- The Settings page appears too big/zoomed in on certain machines.
- Some users are still not seeing Collections being enabled by default on Canary and Dev. For users who want to try Collections, enabling the flag at edge://flags/#edge-collections should still work to turn on the feature.
- 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.
- At certain zoom levels, there is a noticeable line between the browser UI and the web contents.
- Jumplist entries are not consistent between the Start Menu and the Task Bar for some users. We believe this is due to the shortcut on the Start Menu not getting migrated properly after an Edge update and are working on a fix. Additionally, after getting the update for the new icon, there are still places on the Start Menu, for example when searching, that still show the old icon. Other places like the Task Bar may be able to be fixed by un-pinning and then re-pinning any Edge shortcuts that already exist there.
As the holidays are now just about one week away, the Edge team will be taking a break for the next couple of weeks. That means we won't see another Edge Dev build next or on December 31, and Dev channel users will be on today's build until January 7 or so.
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