Dev channel update to 83.0.478.5 is live

[josh_bodner]

Hello insiders, today we’re releasing build 83.0.478.5 to the Dev channel.  This is our Beta release candidate for major version 83, and since it’s also not that much newer than last week’s Dev channel build, it’s a relatively light week this week in terms of changes.  Regarding known issues, we’ve made some fixes for high, constant CPU use in random extensions or tabs, but since there could be many possible causes, we’re still very interested in knowing places where people are still seeing it, especially if it can be consistently reproduced.  We’ve also got a discussion going for anybody who’s been asking for the ability to keep your data in sync between Edge and Chrome:  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/ongoing-sync-between-microsoft-edge-and-chrome-di....  As for what’s new and worth mentioning: 

Added features: 

• Added the ability to select text and read aloud just the selection. 
• Added the ability to add nicknames to payment cards that are stored for easy differentiation. 
• Added support for websites to ask for permission to edit files on your device (not supported by all devices). 
• Added support for importing data from Firefox using the Auto Import At First Run management policy.  
• Added support for the DNS Over HTTPS Mode management policy from upstream Chromium. 

Improved reliability: 

• Fixed an issue where random renderer processes sometimes use high, constant amounts of CPU. 
• Fixed an issue where closing a tab sometimes crashes the browser. 
• Fixed an issue where closing a tab containing a PDF document sometimes crashes the browser. 
• Fixed a crash on launch on Mac. 
• Fixed an issue where attempting to report an unsafe website sometimes crashes the browser. 
• Fixed an issue where using Picture-in-Picture mode to view a video sometimes crashes the browser. 
• Fixed an issue where dragging an image into a Collection sometimes crashes the Collections pane. 

Changed behavior: 

• Changed the Passwords page in Settings to no longer show the number of characters in a password before being given permission to show the password itself. 
• Fixed an issue where trying to copy data out of a form in a PDF sometimes copies text from the main PDF content instead if there’s any text highlighted at the time. 
• Fixed an issue where PDFs are not automatically downloaded when the “Always Open PDF Externally” management policy is enabled. 
• Improved detection of sites where payment information is submitted in order to offer better suggestions for when to save payment card info. 
• Fixed an issue where attempting to manually import data from Firefox sometimes showed multiple Firefox entries.
• Fixed an issue where password autosuggest popups sometimes appear above the text box instead of below it. 
• Fixed an issue where management policies that modify the new tab page break the setting to only show the Favorites Bar on the new tab page. 
• Fixed an issue where signing into the browser with a Work or School account sometimes leads to work or school websites being blocked when they shouldn’t be. 
• Fixed an issue where links that create IE mode tabs in new windows sometimes fail to create more tabs after the first in the new window. 

Known issues: 

• 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.  We hope that this will be improved once version 81 is released to Stable. 
• 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. 
• 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. 
• At certain zoom levels, there is a noticeable line between the browser UI and the web contents.

We will most likely be releasing a small revision to this build later this week to make sure we’re perfectly in sync with all the changes from the Chromium project, and then next week, it’s on to version 84!  Also, make sure you don’t miss our update to bring Stable to version 81. 

[#2]

Hi,
Are favorite sync issues fixed in Stable version 81t?
how about on Canary and Dev? last time I checked I was still getting duplicate favorites and deleted ones coming back on Canary.
it's my biggest concern

[#3]

@josh_bodner thanks for the Work or School blocked website fix. This was driving me crazy. We first thought it was uBlock, but after removing extensions, it still occurred. Glad it will be put into Stable soon!

[#4]

Hi,

The cast to media is still not working and requires you to enable edge://flags/#load-media-router-component-extension to be on.

Please fix this@josh_bodner 

[#5]

@josh_bodner do you know when the possibility to synchronise history and tabs will be implemented? this is such an important feature!

Thank you!

[#6]

@josh_bodner 

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@josh_bodner wrote:

... if this behavior is undesirable, you can temporarily turn it off by disabling the edge://flags/#edge-experimental-scrolling flag. 

---

Do NOT keep this as 'temporarily'. Make it permanent with an option in Settings. The day you force overscroll rubber-banding on me is the day I uninstall and give up on Edge. I don't even get overscroll rubber-banding on my Android phone - on that the page contents just stop dead when I hit bottom or top when scrolling, just like in desktop Firefox, Google Chrome and Edge with that flag set to disabled, with just a faint visual stretch-effect overlay above the stopped-scrolling-dead at page limits page contents underneath.

This is a make-or-break issue for me, whatever else you do or don't do.. Don't get wedded to your fancy idea and assume everyone will want and accept it: KEEP the option to not use it and have regular desktop scrolling.

[#7]

I don't know if it's just me, but when I save an image by clicking "save as" the browser freezes for about 5 seconds.

They could come back with the same Chrome favicon when loading pages

[#8]

@josh_bodner Why Edge notifications are different from the rest of Windows notifications? Why do they stay on screen and we have to click to close them instead of just automatically disappearing into the notification center after some time like the others? Is there a way to change this? Thanks!!

[#9]

@josh_bodner 

When are the EdgeHTML PDF features coming in?

It's really taxing to use the new Edge as a PDF reader. It's better than Chrome but it's still not Edge.

Please add the following features

1. Option to enable/disable Touch Drawing. Can't scroll with fingers when using a pen without exiting Ink mode.

2. Add a highlighter to the toolbar. Using the contextual menu to highlight text is 3 extra steps. Without a mouse, it's really hard to select and highlight. And it doesn't work in Ink mode because text can't be selected while inking.

3. Add a Save button. The current Save As button doesn't help with productivity and file management.

Please bring back these features or at least hold off updating the Old Edge with the newer one. I'm still using it as my default PDF reader (I use new Edge for browsing).

Thanks. 

[#10]

@josh_bodner 

There are a few things with touch input:

1. On YouTube subscriptions and recommended pages tap&hold on the video doesn't produce the context menu to open it in a new tab but instead starts the video.
2. The text selection ui/ux is different from the rest of the OS. That means in all of Windows one would tap or doubletap the text to select it, yet in Edge one has to tap&hold. That messes up the muscle memory and I still try to tap or double tap in edge and then in, say, Twitter I try to ?tap&hold...
3. Tap&hold for text selection in edge often doesn't open the scroll thingies to select more text and the copy button, someone has to use touch keyboard shortcuts
4. Touch keyboard shortcuts have a huge lag between pressing ctrl and c/v/a to produce the actual shortcut command. Instead, if you don't wait like 10 seconds, it just produces the letter.
5. Fast and frequent touch input (tapping many time fast in a small area) freezes the rest of touch input on that tab or on all open tabs and one has to restart the browser for it to work again

[#11]

@thekylef 

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@thekylef wrote:

Why Edge notifications are different from the rest of Windows notifications? Why do they stay on screen and we have to click to close them instead of just automatically disappearing into the notification center after some time like the others? Is there a way to change this? Thanks!!

---

Try to enable this flag:

edge://flags/#enable-native-notifications

Enable native notifications.

Enable support for using the native notification toasts and notification center on platforms where these are available. – Mac, Windows

#enable-native-notifications

[#12]

@josh_bodner 

I've been having an issue that not everything is clearing when you select to clear browsing data on close.  It mainly seems to be cookies that aren't clearing.  I have not added anything to the Do Not Clear section.  Of course, not clearing all the data will automatically log you into sites that should be requesting a password.

[#13]

@josh_bodner 

Apologies but I don't know when the feature was added:

• Search on new tabs uses search box or address bar

But if you leave the option to use the search box enabled is there a reason the search box uses bing over whatever other search engine you selected?

Thanks!

[#14]

@josh_bodner& rest of Edge team, thank you for taking Chromium and trying to create better UX based on it. Collections are nice. I'm waiting for Vertical Tabs, which will be hopefully customizable enough, with at least 2 modes (favicon only, favicon + title), 2 placementes (left, right), and optional quick search box at the top for easily finding right tab.

Is there any shortcut for adding page to the collection?

Having something like Ctrl+D but for Collections would be super handy.

(Currently opened collection should be the default target for such action.)

Please consider improving address bar for narrowing search results. I really like what Firefox has there:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_changing-results-on-the-fly

I'm not saying Edge needs to copy all of it, but at least making starting with % to limit searching only to currently opened tabs would be extremely welcomed. I don't understand why Chromium doesn't have such crucial feature built-in. If you have many tabs, it's impossible to work with Chrom* w/o additional extensions like Session Buddy or Quick Tabs. 

Microsoft Edge Add-ons is far from being usable and trustful, sadly. No homepages, no list of permissions that extension will ask for, no screenshots, no way to find all extensions coming from one publisher, no publisher pages, very poor search, and so on. It's bad, makes it too easy for fake/unofficial extensions to proliferate. Not everyone is tech-savvy, so can easily misinstall wrong extension, e.g. this fake Violentmonkey instead of legit Violentmonkey (see Edge addons listing legit? #893 @ violentmonkey/violentmonkey). BTW type "monkey" in search and none of mentioned extensions will be shown...

Sorry for ending on such a harsh not, but extensions are vital part of browsers, so making Edge better than Chrome won't be enough in the grand scheme of things, Edge Add-ons page will need to be better than Chrome Web Store too. But don't feel discouraged. The bar is not set high, as Chrome Web Store has quite bad UX to begin with IMHO, so making something better shouldn't be that hard.

Please continue your work for making browsing experience better. It's much appreciated!

[#15]

There seems to be an issue with the latest update where the "start-up" setting is not being honoured by Edge - it always "continues where it left off" even if the setting is to open new tab or open a custom page.

[#16]

@josh_bodner Added the ability to select text and read aloud just the selection. 

The shortcut "Control + Shift + U" (that you see on the right click menu) reads everything and not just the selection.

[#17]

@josh_bodner 

It would be great if you could address the ongoing frustration that is Controlled Feature Rollouts.
As a start if you could please indicate every time in these release notes when this applies, and to which markets or regions, etc. 
Secondly please up the speed at which you then release these features, or better yet just can this entire concept for Dev and Canary builds.

We're here to test the browser and live on the cutting edge. Often these features get announced and don't show up for several weeks, if seemingly ever. By then they're often completely forgotten about and aren't well tested by the user community. It's still not clear what the point of this is in these testing release channels?

Thanks for the great work otherwise Edge Team!

[#18]

@Ed Sparks 

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@Ed Sparks wrote:

@josh_bodner 

It would be great if you could address the ongoing frustration that is Controlled Feature Rollouts.
As a start if you could please indicate every time in these release notes when this applies, and to which markets or regions, etc. 
Secondly please up the speed at which you then release these features, or better yet just can this entire concept for Dev and Canary builds.

We're here to test the browser and live on the cutting edge. Often these features get announced and don't show up for several weeks, if seemingly ever. By then they're often completely forgotten about and aren't well tested by the user community. It's still not clear what the point of this is in these testing release channels?

Thanks for the great work otherwise Edge Team!

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Facts! Controlled Feature Rollouts might be a little helpful for the developers, just a little, but for the users which are the majority, it's frustrating and confusing. it's hard to use Edge insider channels as default browser, so then user has to set another browser as default and it will reduce the usage and thus the data and telemetry that is sent to Microsoft. so controlled feature rollouts have negative effects overall.

[#19]

@Russ_Turrentine it might not be that your cookies aren't being successfully cleared, it might just be that any passwords you saved are automatically signing you back into the websites without asking you:  

Do you have any examples of cookies that aren't related to login that you don't see getting cleared?  

[#20]

@przemoc I've been having a discussion with the extensions team recently about some of the issues you mentioned, so this is very helpful, especially the violent monkey example.