Forum Discussion
Possible bug - unable to disable Sidebar/Discover in Edge 111.0.1661.44
Hello,
I am evaluating the new features in Edge 111 Stable for deployment. I have the HubsSidebarEnabled policy set to 0 (Recommended). However, the Discover icon still shows prominently at the top right-hand corner of the browser. If a user hovers the mouse over this icon, it opens the sidebar and causes it to stay open unless the 'auto hide sidebar' is manually toggled.
My expected behavior for this policy is that the user would not see Discover or the Sidebar unless they went into the settings and manually turned it on.
I suspect this is a bug, because when in this configuration, the Always show sidebar setting is grayed out and can't be unselected by the user:
It looks like there used to be a policy to specifically disable Discover, but the documentation for this policy says that it is obsolete as of v105 because Discover was moved to the Sidebar. I don't think this is exactly true anymore.
How is this feature intended to work with these policies in this stable release? I don't want a thousand users to suddenly see a sidebar added to their browser and think some kind of third-party toolbar got installed.
Thanks!
Andrew
9 Replies
Kelly_Y
Hello,
I was asked to revisit this policy due to some of the buzz around Copilot. Here is what I have found the current state of it to be.It looks like when the HubsSidebarEnabled policy is set to 0 as Recommended, the Sidebar is still enabled for the user by default the next time they launch the browser. The "Always show sidebar" setting is correctly set to Off, but the user sees the sidebar anyway. If the user toggles the setting to on, then back to off, the setting is then respected.
We've had the sidebar disabled as Mandatory for the last 9 months because of this unpredictable behavior.
Is there a fix in the works that would allow us to accommodate the minority of our users that wish to use the sidebar without forcing it on every user?
Thanks!
Andrew- Hello,
I was asked to revisit this again, and it appears that the sidebar now correctly defaults to a collapsed state when I set it as Disabled/Recommended.
Thanks,
Andrew
- 4 months later and this bug still exists.
Microsoft Edge Default Settings - Show Sidebar Disabled does nothing. - It looks like it works as intended if I set the policy as Mandatory, so this increases my suspicion that the Recommended behavior is a bug.
- Kelly_Y
Microsoft
AndrewSAIF Hi! In Microsoft Edge v111, Admins do not have the ability to disable Discover and keep the Sidebar.
I've spoken to the team and they have confirmed your findings. In v111, if the HubsSidebarEnabled policy is set as disabled with Recommended level, the settings page shows gray out where users can not toggle on to show sidebar (this is same as previous Microsoft Edge version), users can still get back sidebar by hover/click the Bing icon in the toolbar.
If Admin disabled HubsSidebarEnabled policy with Mandatory level, both sidebar and the Bing icon in the toolbar will be invisible (users cannot get back sidebar).
There are additional improvements planned for v112, additional information can be found in Release Notes: Microsoft Edge release notes for Beta Channel | Microsoft Learn. Thanks!
-Kelly
Kelly_Y
It looks like the feature slider is no longer bugged when the sidebar policy is set as Recommended after updating to 111.0.1661.54:
However, disabling the sidebar with this recommended policy still does not hide Discover:There does not appear to be a separate policy to hide Discover, besides the one that was obsoleted in v105.
Disabling the sidebar by setting the policy as mandatory does hide Discover. So this is still my only option at this point, unless there are plans to address this inconsistency before v112 Stable releases. The behavior I describe above is identical in beta 112.0.1722.23.Thanks,
Andrew
