Edge Workspaces preview for consumer accounts now available
Today, we’re excited to announce that the preview of Edge Workspaces for consumer accounts is now available! At Ignite 2022, we announced Edge Workspaces, the multiplayer browsing experience that lets you organize projects in separate, customizable browser windows which can be easily shared with others. Collaborators in a workspace share the same set of tabs so they can easily stay in sync and browse together. Previously, Edge Workspaces was only available as an enterprise public preview, but today we’re expanding that preview for anyone who wants to try it out at home on your own, or with friends and family. Preview details: You will need to be signed into Microsoft Edge 111.0.1661.51 (or higher) on a PC with your Microsoft account to join the preview (macOS preview availability targeted for early April 2023). You will get five invites to send to friends and family to join the preview with you. We’re starting with a limited group of users to get feedback and will continue to roll out the preview to more users through the spring. Click here to sign up for the Edge Workspaces Consumer Preview. Please submit feedback using the thumbs up or down prompt in the Edge Workspaces menu, or through the feedback tool in Microsoft Edge.
Inprivate mode seriously needs to have brought back the blue icon in the top left corner
One thing that the new edge is lacking and seriously needs to bring back that internet explorer and the old edge had was that in the top left corner an inprivate icon to indicate you're using inprivate browsing. The current inprivate mode looks too chrome like and is easy to mistake it for chrome. With the blue inprivate icon in the top left corner, it would give edge a sense of uniqueness from chrome and it was in both the old edge and internet explorer, it worked perfectly then and there really is no reason to not bring it back. Looking at a side by side comparison, the browser looked better when it had the blue inprivate icon when you were using inprivate mode
Introducing Microsoft Edge Secure Network
Today, we're excited to share that we have kicked off experiments for Microsoft Edge Secure Network in the Canary channel of Microsoft Edge. We are opening this preview to a small audience to get initial feedback and recommendations so we can offer the best in-browser Secure Network experience. What does Secure Network do? With Edge Secure Network, you can connect to public Wi-Fi at coffee shops, airports, restaurants, hotels, & other venues, complete transactions, and shop online, all with the improved privacy and security that gives you the peace of mind you deserve. Secure Network helps you protect your information by masking your device's IP address, encrypting your data, and routing it through a secure network (powered by Cloudflare) to a server that is geographically co-located so it’s harder for malicious actors to see your true location and what you’re doing. It also prevents your internet service provider from collecting your browsing data, like details about which websites you visit, and helps prevent online entities from using your IP address for profiling and sending you targeted ads. As part of our first experiment, we’re giving everyone who tries this out a small amount of free Secure Network bandwidth to use however they see fit. For some activities like streaming videos, this allotment may be used significantly quicker than other activities like shopping and browsing the web. We encourage you to use the built-in controls to enable and disable the Secure Network and use this data however it best suits your needs and send us feedback about how Secure Network works for you. See our support page for more details. We will be diligently reviewing feedback as we over the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for Edge Secure Network and help us create the best experience possible! How it Works Whenever Secure Network is connected, your browsing traffic will be encrypted and routed through our service’s servers and then to its final destination. This helps ensure that your personal data will be more secure no matter what complicated route your browsing data takes or how many parties are involved in providing the content inside your favorite web page. Geo Location and Regions A lot of web technology relies on trying to intelligently provide results based on where you are located. We want to ensure that the web still works as you expect it to so when you search for a nearby restaurant or local movie showtimes, you can still get relevant results. We also want to help protect you as an individual, so you’re not personally associated with those results just by browsing the web. We’ve partnered with Cloudflare to help ensure that if VPNs are allowed in your region, wherever you connect to the Secure Network service, you will connect to a local data center and the IP address your browsing data flows through will be geographically similar to your actual region. However, websites will not see your individual network address, keeping your browsing disassociated from you while still allowing the internet to ‘just work’ as you expect. Microsoft Account and Data Collection During this preview phase Secure Network requires users to be signed into the browser with their Microsoft account. Sign-in is used solely to authenticate to the service and ensure you’re to receive more free data during the current period. No data about your user identity or account is sent over the Secure Network connection as part of this service. Additionally, limited diagnostic data may be ephemerally present on our partner’s servers for no more than 25 hours to help troubleshoot connection and performance issues, but is not persisted or directly associated with any given user. See our privacy promise and Cloudflare privacy notice for even more details. Send Us Feedback Be on the lookout for Secure Network as we expand our testing. We look forward to discovering how you would like to use Secure Network to protect your data, what works well, and what we can improve. Let us know on the shield icon flyout by giving us a quick thumbs up or down or use the in-browser feedback icon to send us more detailed feedback. Alt + Shift + I – Shortcut to send feedback As always, thanks for being a part of this journey towards a more private and secure web! Brandon Maslen, Principal Software Engineer Kelda Anderson, Product ManagerPick up where you left off on Microsoft Edge PDF Reader
Thank you for all the love and feedback that you have shared with us as we continue our journey to become your PDF reader of choice. Reading long PDF documents is a very time consuming and tedious task we have all gone through. To make reading such documents easier we have already added ‘Read Aloud’ that lets you rest your eyes and listen to your PDF documents. We have now added another feature to make your reading experience even better by letting you pick up where you left off on the PDF documents you read in Microsoft Edge. When you reopen your PDF documents in Microsoft Edge, it will start from the position, zoom state and the layout that you were last reading it in. The feature is currently available in Microsoft Edge Canary and Dev channels and will be available by default to all users in Microsoft Edge release 95. If you prefer starting your PDF documents from the very first page every time you open the document, we have added a setting that lets you do that as well. Share your feedback with us and tell us how we can build a better PDF reader that suits your needs. Go to “…” menu > Help and feedback > Send feedback, or simply use the shortcut (Shift+Alt+i) to open the feedback tool and share your thoughts with this.Reminder: Adobe Flash Player end of support
Microsoft is ending support for Adobe Flash Player on Microsoft Edge (new and legacy) and Internet Explorer 11 at the end of 2020. Here's what you need to know: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/09/04/update-adobe-flash-end-support/ Key highlights: In the new Microsoft Edge, Adobe Flash Player will be removed by January 2021. The schedule of changes is available here. After December 2020, you will no longer receive a “Security Update for Adobe Flash Player” from Microsoft that applies to Microsoft Edge Legacy and Internet Explorer 11. In the second half of 2021, the APIs, group polices and user interfaces that specifically govern the behavior of Adobe Flash Player will be removed from Microsoft Edge (legacy) and Internet Explorer 11 via the latest “Cumulative Update” on Windows 10 platforms and via “Cumulative Update for Internet Explorer 11” or “Monthly Rollup” on Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Embedded 8 Standard.GOOD NEWS: The new downloads UI asks to whether open or save the file before downloading it
From Edge Canary version 86.0.613.0, there is a new downloads UI which asks you to whether open, save or to save as the download before downloading it which is a great feature as the user would now get the option to use the file once and not save it. I am thankful to the Edge engineering team for implementing this feature and making it look better from what I had suggested here. The images of new Downloads UI are as follows:
