Internet Explorer Archive
Microsoft is working on a new feature for its Edge browser that will let you limit the amount of RAM it uses. Leopeva64, who is one of the best at finding new Edge features, has spotted a new settings section in test builds of the browser that includes a slider so you can limit how much RAM Edge gets access to. ↫ Tom Warren at The Verge Isn’t it the operating system’s job to manage memory? It seems very archaic to manually set memory limits on an application, or am I totally out of touch?
Last week, I turned on my PC, installed a Windows update, and rebooted to find Microsoft Edge automatically open with the Chrome tabs I was working on before the update. I don’t use Microsoft Edge regularly, and I have Google Chrome set as my default browser. Bleary-eyed at 9AM, it took me a moment to realize that Microsoft Edge had simply taken over where I’d left off in Chrome. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I never imported my data into Microsoft Edge, nor did I confirm whether I wanted to import my tabs. But here was Edge automatically opening after a Windows update with all the Chrome tabs I’d been working on. I didn’t even realize I was using Edge at first, and I was confused why all my tabs were suddenly logged out. ↫ Tom Warren at The Verge I would never accept such disregard for users from my computer.
Microsoft Edge has slowly crept its way up as one of the more popular web browsers people use every day, especially on Windows 11. In 2022, it even overtook Safari as the second-most-popular browser in the world behind Chrome (although it has since dropped back to third). Despite running on Chromium, the same engine as Chrome, it has a lot of features even Chrome lacks, like collections and shopping features that can help you save money. And, of course, there’s the recent rise of Bing Chat. There’s a reason why I use it every day on some of the best laptops I review, And even with all this popularity, it still feels like Microsoft is trying too hard with Edge. The company has gotten way too aggressive with its web browser recently, and it’s very concerning to see this behavior. Microsoft really wants you to try the browser no matter what, so it puts it in so many areas of Windows 11. The concept of my operating system “pushing” anything on me, as is the norm on Windows and macOS, is entirely foreign to me these days. Fedora or Linux Mint aren’t advertising their services in the settings application, or pushing their browser through pop-ups or by secretly changing the default browset setting, or whatever other sleazeball tactics Microsoft and Apple are up to these days. I don’t understand how people put up with that nonsense.
Edge has a built-in image enhancement tool that, according to Microsoft, can use “super-resolution to improve clarity, sharpness, lighting, and contrast in images on the web.” Although the feature sounds exciting, recent Microsoft Edge Canary updates have provided more information on how image enhancement works. The browser now warns that it sends image links to Microsoft instead of performing on-device enhancements. The biggest problem with Edge’s “super-resolution” and other questionable services is that it is enabled by default. Therefore, unaware users automatically give the browser permission to send pictures to Microsoft for processing and enhancement. Don’t use Edge.
Being the default out-of-the-box browser on Windows 10 and 11 makes Microsoft Edge a go-to utility for downloading Chrome or another browser. That upsets Microsoft so much that it constantly comes with more aggressive and user-hostile methods to make customers stay on Edge. An attempt to install Chrome using Edge Canary now results in the browser displaying two ads: the first (tiny one) will pop on the screen when the Chrome website loads, and the second, a humongous full-size banner, will appear once the download starts. Yikes! Yikes indeed. Probably s suggestion by their glorified autocomplete.
Many federal policy changes are well known before they are announced. Hints in speeches, leaks, and early access to reporters at major publications all pave the way for the eventual confirmation. But on Thursday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) dropped a big one that seemed to take everyone by surprise. Starting in 2026, any scientific publication that receives federal funding will need to be openly accessible on the day it’s published. The move has the potential to further shake up the scientific publishing industry, which has already adopted preprint archives, similar mandates from other funding organizations, and greatly expanded access to publications during the pandemic. Aaron Schwartz died trying to make this happen.
Internet Explorer was finally killed off for almost every consumer version of Windows on June 15, 2022. It’s death was even mourned celebrated with faux gravestones commemorating it as a “good tool to download other browsers”. However, it seems like Microsoft’s browser still lives on in the depths of its latest operating system. Although Windows 11 does not officially come bundled with Internet Explorer, the ancient browser can still be launched on the OS. This thing will never die. I will go to my grave when Windows 32 hits and it will still come with iexplore.exe because the online passport request form in some tiny municipality in Slovenia only works in IE.
After 25+ years of helping people use and experience the web, Internet Explorer (IE) is officially retired and out of support as of today, June 15, 2022. To many millions of you, thank you for using Internet Explorer as your gateway to the internet. You hear that? That’s the cries of thousands of enterprise software engineers finally realising their garbage enterprise software doesn’t work anymore.
Microsoft is introducing a new feature in Edge allowing customers to pay for e-commerce transactions in installments – and not everybody is happy. The ‘buy now, pay later’ (BNPL) feature is, controversially, integrated at the browser level, thanks to a partnership with third-party payments provider Zip, formerly QuadPay. The option is similar to those already offered by many e-commerce sites and web payment providers such as PayPal. Tacky and tasteless feature.
A common request is your need for Microsoft Edge to span the breadth of operating systems in your environment. Last October, we made Microsoft Edge available on Linux in preview channels (Dev and Beta channels) and today, the browser is generally available for Linux via the stable channel. This milestone officially rounds out the full complement of major platforms served by Microsoft Edge through stable channel: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and now Linux. To use Microsoft Edge on Linux, users can download it from our website or retrieve it using the command line from a Linux package manager. I hear Edge is a decent browser, but I think it’s safe to assume it does its best to trick you into using Microsoft services. I really see no need for this in my Linux environment, especially since it’s just Chromium, and there are far, far better Google-free Chromium alternatives for Linux.
If you think making it harder to change the default browser away from Edge in Windows 11 was the only sleazy tactic Microsoft is employing to shove Edge down Windows users’ throats – think again. The company is using a microsoft-edge: URL scheme everywhere in Windows to bypass the default browser setting altogether, but luckily, competing browsers have caught on. The Brave web browser added support for the microsoft-edge: URL scheme with version 1.30.86, released last week. So, you no longer need to install EdgeDeflector if you’re using Brave as your default browser. It’ll pop up as an option when you click on a microsoft-edge: link. This makes Brave the first web browser to implement support for Microsoft’s anti-competitive URL scheme. However, it’s not the only browser doing so. Mozilla developer Masatoshi Kimura has also written patches to implement the protocol into Firefox. It has yet to pass review and get merged into Firefox, but the ball is rolling. Firefox’s implementation is part of its overall Windows 11 shell integration work. From everything I’ve read and been told, Edge is a good, solid browser in and of itself – it’s just so incredibly sad Microsoft has to stoop this low to force people to use it.
With Windows 11 just having been unveiled, there’s quite a few tidbits to go through – news that has come out after the actual event. First, Windows 11 will spell the official end of Internet Explorer shipping as part of Windows. At one point in Windows 10’s lifetime, you could have had Internet Explorer, the legacy version of Microsoft Edge, and the new Chromium-powered Edge all installed. This trio of browsers was the perfect illustration of Microsoft’s struggles with the web over the past decade, but now that Internet Explorer is being laid to rest in 2022, it’s disappearing from Windows 11, too. About time.
Over the last year, you may have noticed our movement away from Internet Explorer (“IE”) support, such as an announcement of the end of IE support by Microsoft 365 online services. Today, we are at the next stage of that journey: we are announcing that the future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge. Not only is Microsoft Edge a faster, more secure and more modern browsing experience than Internet Explorer, but it is also able to address a key concern: compatibility for older, legacy websites and applications. Microsoft Edge has Internet Explorer mode (“IE mode”) built in, so you can access those legacy Internet Explorer-based websites and applications straight from Microsoft Edge. With Microsoft Edge capable of assuming this responsibility and more, the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application will be retired and go out of support on June 15, 2022, for certain versions of Windows 10. It’s going to a nice farm upstate.
The legacy version of the Microsoft Edge, which is set to be discontinued in March, will be removed from Windows 10 with the release of Patch Tuesday updates in April. As we reported recently, Windows 10 currently comes with three different web browsers – Legacy Edge (hidden), Chromium Edge (default), and Internet Explorer (enabled). In an attempt to reduce clutter and improve security, Microsoft is removing the older browsers from the OS. I mean, on the one hand it seems like this is a reasonably move – there’s a new version of Edge, so an update will remove the old one. On the other hand, though, these are really two entirely different applications that happen to share a name, and it seems grotesque and user-hostile to just remove an entire application without even giving users the option to keep it. Sure, this concerns an outdated browser nobody uses, and that makes it easy to handwave this away, but what if this happens to an application you actually like and use?
We are pleased to announce the availability of the Microsoft Edge Dev Channel for Linux! Today’s release supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE distributions. Going forward, we plan to release weekly builds following our typical Dev Channel cadence alongside our other supported platforms. In this post, we’ll walk you through how to install Microsoft Edge on your distribution, what to expect from the Dev Channel, and how to share your feedback. I’m not entirely sure who, exactly, Edge for Linux is for – but there’s no denying the fact Microsoft feels that it’s necessary to have their browser on Linux means the company is definitely taking desktop Linux seriously.
If you were brave and bored enough to read through this long, long list of enterprise babble from Microsoft, you’d eventually come to the interesting bit: Our mission to bring Microsoft Edge to the platforms our customers use daily takes its next step: starting in October, Microsoft Edge on Linux will be available to download on the Dev preview channel. When it’s available, Linux users can go to the Microsoft Edge Insiders site to download the preview channel, or they can download it from the native Linux package manager. And just like other platforms, we always appreciate feedback—it’s the best way to serve our customers. Microsoft announced that Edge would come to Linux earlier this year, but now they’ve set a date for the availability of developer builds. I wonder if it will come with the old and by now well-tested VA-API patches to enable hardware accelerated video decoding, something Google is refusing to enable for Chrome for Linux.
It’s no secret that we’ve been enthusiastic about Microsoft’s new, Chromium-based Edge browser for a while now. But that enthusiasm has mostly been limited to “a default Windows browser that doesn’t suck,” rather than being for any particularly compelling set of features the new Edge brings to the browser ecosystem. In a folksy announcement this week, Microsoft politely declared its determination to step up our expectations from “doesn’t suck” to somewhere on the level of “oh, wow.” Microsoft Corporate VP Liat Ben-Zur spent plenty of time enthusing about the way the new features are, apparently, already changing her life. The only thing that has me excited about the new Edge is that Windows will finally have a proper default browser that isn’t either complete garbage (Internet Explorer) or ignored by every web developer ever (the old Edge).
Starting now, Microsoft will roll out their new Chromium-based Edge browser to their millions of Windows 10 users. And this will also mark the end of an era. The era of the Trident-Engine. But hadn’t the Trident era already ended when Edge appeared? Not really. This is a very deep look at the Trident engine. Goodness.
From this incredible momentum, today I’m pleased to announce the new Microsoft Edge is now available to download on all supported versions of Windows and macOS in more than 90 languages. Microsoft Edge is also available on iOS and Android, providing a true cross-platform experience. The new Microsoft Edge provides world class performance with more privacy, more productivity and more value while you browse. Our new browser also comes with our Privacy Promise and we can’t wait for you to try new features like tracking prevention, which is on by default, and provides three levels of control while you browse. The new Edge will also come to Linux, so this gives us yet another Chromium-based browser available on all platforms. Why, exactly, you’d choose Edge over Chrome, Vivaldi, or any others is still not entirely clear to me, however.
It looks like Microsoft could finally bring Chromium-powered Edge, the revamped browser with dark mode and a set of exciting features to Linux. Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge browser specifically built for Linux is being actively developed, and the development was confirmed at the Ignite conference. As shown in the screenshot of a slide from Ignite session, Microsoft Edge is listed as a compatible software for Linux. I wonder if Microsoft will do the legwork to ensure proper integration with GNOME, KDE, and others.
