Edge installed via SCCM behaves differently than Edge installed C2R

[AndrewSAIF]

I stumbled onto a weird problem today after setting up a deployment for Edge Dev 82.0.432.3.

As I've been testing, I've been installing Edge using the regular click-to-run installer, and the policies I've configured in a GPO have worked fine. Today we created a deployment using the MSI from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/business/download, and all of the instances of Edge installed using this deployment are behaving strangely. 

Despite the machine showing the GPO in RSOP, and despite Edge itself displaying my policies in Edge://policy, certain policies are not being respected by the browser. For example, I have:

ExternalProtocolDialogShowAlwaysOpenCheckbox = True

AutoImportAtFirstRun = 1

However, Internet Explorer favorites are not imported on first run, and I don't see an 'always open' checkbox when I invoke a protocol handler. 

These all worked under the C2R version. In fact, on my main test machine, I verified that these policies were working, uninstalled the C2R version, then installed from SCCM. They both stopped working. They still both work in the Beta version I had that was installed via C2R (81.0.416.16). 

What's strange is that not all policies are broken. Some of them (such as enforce sign-in and hidefirstrunexperience) still work. 

Is anyone aware of anything that would cause this? Is there a difference between the C2R and MSI versions?

Thanks!

Andrew

[#2]

@AndrewSAIF 

On Server 2016 RDS I also saw issues with favorites not auto imported from IE, at first run. Wen only use MSI deployment - never C2R.

[#3]

I did some more testing, and I think I have a better handle of what is going on. 

1. It looks like the ExternalProtocolDialogShowAlwaysOpenCheckbox policy no longer works at all in Dev 82.0.432.3 and Canary 82.0.439.0 (which I had installed C2R). I installed the latest Edge Dev MSI on a Windows 10 Home machine not joined to our domain, configured this policy in the registry, and it also will not show the checkbox either. It still works in Beta 81.0.416.16. I assumed this was caused somehow by the change in deployment method, but it turns out I just hadn't tested it in the most recent Dev version. I might create a separate thread about this bug. 

2. The failure to import IE favorites seems to be hit or miss. I am used to it failing on Edge 80/81, but 82 had been working pretty reliably after they put in the fix in this thread:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/enterprise/autoimportatfirstrun-policy-no-longer-imports-favo...

It seems like it is mostly happening on machines on which a previous version of Edge Chromium had been installed. I imaged a new machine and the deployment and favorites import worked fine on that. 

Andrew

[#4]

@AndrewSAIF , for the machines that had a previous install of edge - can you please indicate if this was uninstalled or upgraded in-place?