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.
