Dev channel update to 84.0.508.0 is live

[josh_bodner]

Hello Insiders!  Today we’re releasing build 84.0.508.0 to the Dev channel.  This week, we’ve got some detailed steps on how to nickname payment cards you’ve saved to your Edge profile:  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/give-nicknames-to-your-credit-cards-in-microsoft-edg....  As for all of the new features and fixes this week: 

Added features: 

• Added the ability to attach text notes to specific items in a Collection, as well as the ability to change the background color for general notes. 
• Added extra warnings when downloading inherently dangerous file types like DLLs. 

Improved reliability: 

• Fixed an issue where running the favorites deduplicator sometimes crashes the browser. 

Changed behavior: 

• Fixed an issue where clearing browsing data sometimes misses some things. 
• Fixed an issue where the address bar on new tabs is sometimes populated with old search terms instead of being empty. 
• Fixed an issue where InPrivate windows are sometimes blocked for users of Family Safety even though they shouldn’t be. 
• Fixed an issue where credential prompts are sometimes not shown, for example if they’re initiated from within an extension instead of a webpage. 
• Fixed an issue where adding certain language packs to Windows causes Edge spellcheck to be disabled due to an error downloading the spellcheck files. 
• Fixed an issue where enabling extension sync sometimes causes extensions to no longer be able to be installed from the Chrome web store because the setting to do so inadvertently gets turned off. 
• Fixed an issue where extensions that have been synced from one installation to another sometimes can’t be removed from the installation they were synced to. 
• Fixed an issue where Read Aloud sometimes doesn’t stop when it should. 
• Fixed an issue where the browser profile name is sometimes inconsistent between Settings, the profile button flyout, etc.
• Fixed an issue where searching for entries on the History management page sometimes messes up the page visually. 
• Fixed an issue where text notes in a Collection sometimes get deleted immediately after being synced or saved if they’re empty. 
• Fixed an issue on Mac where the Touch Bar media scrubber sometimes doesn’t appear on pages that have media. 
• Fixed an issue where toggling text spacing options in Immersive Reader while Line Focus mode is already active causes the current focus area to be messed up. 

Known issues: 

• Tabs sometimes appear squished or too small, even when there are only a few of them.  This is most often caused by clicking a link in a different program that opens a new tab in Edge, and can usually be fixed by changing the size of the tab band, for example by resizing the window. 
• 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 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 now that 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. 

As always, we couldn’t do this without you! 

[#2]

@josh_bodner 

When you will enable Immersive reader for PDF file  😑 ?

I'm using the Canary build, but still, I don't have this feature enabled yet.

Please, if you still working on it, add it as a flag, so the one who needs it will be able to enable it.

I fell that PDF team are lazy because we didn't see any improvement for PDF engine that worths to be mention except the highlighter and inking tool. The PDF engine is just terrible, It's too slow and even doesn't support bookmarks.

If you can't add old Edge's PDF features, just consider building a separate app for PDFs. because we really need it.

[#3]

@josh_bodner 

The loss of options for images on the New Tab Page I had in Canary before a later update restored them has now happened in Dev.

The loss of the edge://flags/ setting to 'Force Dark Mode for Web Contents' I had in Canary - it's moved to the 'Unavailable' column - has now happened in Dev too. This is a HUGE issue for me.

You are still saying that the ability to disable the 'Microsoft Edge scrolling personality' is temporary. Until I know it is permanent I will never consider making Edge my default browser. I want and will only accept the normal Windows 10 scrolling behaviour I get with that set to disabled so it behaves like all my other programs. If it starts scrolling like Legacy Edge with no choice, I'm off.

Still no ability to sync History with Android Edge. Still no ability to access edge://flags (or any edge:// page) in Android Edge; still no ability to pin the sites I want to the new tab page in Android Edge; still no ability to darken web pages in Android Edge either through the #enable-force-dark flag or through ability to use the Dark Reader extension; still no ability in Android Edge to move control bar to the top.

For me to move to Edge BOTH desktop and phone app have to be acceptable to me - it's both or neither. It continues too be neither, and overall to be going backwards.

You appear to be doing none of the things I want or need, and just doing things that to me make things worse (like removing the enable force dark, and trying to insist on a scrolling behaviour I find repellent). You're rapidly running out of time to convince me to move to Edge.

[#4]

@josh_bodner As to the bug of blacked out Edge windows.  It never happens for production or dev on my Surface device.  It happens regularly however on my Dell Alpha R1 (ASM100) which is a Nvidia 645M.  Happens now in production and in dev very often after a timeout or a switch to another account and back after some time (if i do the switch quickly no issues).  All the content in the window appears to still be clickable, as I'm able to close the window clicking where the 'x' should be and reopen everything comes back.

Not the end of the world, but annoying.   Anyhow, thought I'd mention in case you needed a specific test case running latest Win 10 and Nvidia drivers. 

[#5]

Totally agree - the loss of Force Dark Mode for Web Contents will drive me back to Chrome.

[#6]

@josh_bodner Hi Josh,

Today when I received the latest update to the development build, when I checked my favorites I quickly saw that they had in fact been duplicated. I'm so glad that the developer's added the 'remove duplicate favorites' feature to take care of this issue, at least to me that feature makes a big difference.

[#7]

• Fixed an issue where searching for entries on the History management page sometimes messes up the page visually. 

Thank you so much for this! you have no idea how many times my history was messed up because of loading with page down and deleting some of them..

• Tabs sometimes appear squished or too small, even when there are only a few of them.  This is most often caused by clicking a link in a different program that opens a new tab in Edge, and can usually be fixed by changing the size of the tab band, for example by resizing the window. 

Glad you are aware of this issue! 🙂 I love the new edge. already default browser on my laptop.

[#8]

@josh_bodner 

Not sure if anyone else is having this issue in their downloads page, but when I scroll down through my downloads, then click anywhere on the screen, it shoots me back up to the top of the page. Pretty annoying when I want to open multiple files in my downloads. 

[#9]

@jchow it looks like this is still happening in Canary too, so I'll make sure the downloads team knows!  

[#10]

@Michael Jones I suspect you're not actually running the latest Nvidia drivers, which might be why you're still seeing this.  I have a laptop with a GT 650M, and even though Geforce Experience says it's up to date when you try to download the latest drivers, the version number is actually really old, like Nvidia just stopped publishing new drivers for those devices a while ago (which is understandable, given that they're close to a decade old at this point...)  

[#11]

@YusifJasim 

I think the new edge dev team have already got the expectation for the PDF feature in new edge, and the reason why they didn't improve it, is that there are something deeper about the software's kernel, which may take so much time to refactor/rebuild it and needs more consideration. Let us be patient and give them more time.

Ps: There are some good pdf apps in Windows Store, just give "Xodo" or "Draw PDF" a try.

[#12]

+1

The Force Dark Mode will also drive me back to Chrome.

Please, reenable it... ASAP

[#13]

Anything is possible. :). I know I download the drivers for it straight from Nvidia and use their drivers vs what’s in the Dell site for sure.

[#14]

@josh_bodner 

noooooo the force dark mode feature is removed???!?!! is it possible for me to revert to an older version?

[#15]

Really not happy about the removal of the 'Force Dark Mode for Web Contents' flag without any explanation. My monitor doesn't go very dark, so at night, bright pages like this are borderline painful to look at. I would love to hear why some of the more popular flags are being removed.

[#16]

Syncing feature not reliable. That didn't get the improvement in a few months. How long for waiting the syncing works as expected.

[#17]

@ngnlx Agree!

[#18]

edge://flags still missing lots of flags.

[#19]

@josh_bodner The removal of "force dark mode for web content" really bugs me, too - it was the only reason that I chose to try Edge Chromium in the first place. I came to like the overall experience, but with true dark mode missing, I'm forced to look at other browser alternatives... It would be a real shame, because it would have been the one Browser more trustworthy than Chrome itself, with comparable or even better features and speed, that I could use across all my platforms (Windows 10, MacOS Catalina and iOS/iPadOS 13).

[#20]

Another +1 for bringing back the Force Dark Mode on Web pages experimental flag. Or at the very least, give us some explanation of why its been removed and if it will ever come back. 

I've submitted multiple reports over the last six months about contrast on page elements, such as check boxes, being low to non-existent on some sites (which if course renders them invisible).  I haven't noticed any progress on this issue or any aspect of Force Dark Mode which makes me wonder if it's being worked on it at all.

The idea of adding a per-site on/off toggle (temporary) and blacklist (permanent) is discussed in this thread as a workaround for websites with insurmountable issues.

While we're waiting for news on Force Dark Mode on Websites, I recommend trying Dark Reader from the Chrome Store. Warning: there is a page load performance hit, but IMO this is a far better option than switching back to Chrome!