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Doors on the Edge Insider Bounty Program flung open Having finally pushed out the first Beta preview of its Chromium-based browser, Microsoft has launched a bounty programme aimed at getting researchers to kick the tyres on its latest and greatest.Up to $30k is available to researchers who find what Microsoft deems "critical and important" vulnerabilities in the Beta and Dev channels of Chromium Edge. The Canary channel is excluded because, well, it seems hardly fair to poke holes in daily builds that are, by definition, not fit for public consumption.Interestingly, up to $15k is available to anyone who discovers critical...

Microsoft is unveiling a number of new features for its upcoming Edge Chromium browser today. The first big addition is a new “IE Mode” for Edge that will allow businesses to load old sites directly in the new Edge Chromium browser, using the Internet Explorer rendering engine. Microsoft is building IE directly into Edge for this purpose, so businesses aren’t forced to directly use IE for ancient internal sites. “What we’re going to do is make this totally seamless,” explains Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, in an interview with The Verge. Currently, the existing version of Edge will open Internet Explorer 11...

Chromium base should ease porting pains substantially Microsoft may be closer to its first Mac browser in 14 years."We also expect this work to enable us to bring Microsoft Edge to other platforms like macOS," Joe Belfiore said last December, when he announced the move to a Chromium-based engine for the Edge browser. "Improving the web-platform experience for both end users and developers requires that the web platform and the browser be consistently available to as many devices as possible."Dialogue boxes touting support for macOS ("10.12 and above") have been spotted. The company has also invited interest in ports of...

Microsoft is the latest tech giant taking it upon itself to police so-called “fake news,” packaging an app with its mobile browser that warns users not to trust various news websites, including a number of conservative ones. NewsGuard is an extension available for most browsers that displays a green checkmark or red exclamation point next to users’ address bar, to denote whether websites satisfy criteria “such as whether the site regularly publishes false content, reveals conflicts of interest, discloses financing, or publicly corrects reporting errors.” This is achieved by a team of “trained journalists and experienced editors,” rather than algorithms....

Microsoft starts accepting beta testers for the new Edge Microsoft is currently working on building a new browser after its EdgeHTML experiment failed, so now the company is transitioning to Chromium for an approach that just can’t go wrong.The software giant has started receiving beta testers for the new browser, as it’s now likely finalizing the preview build due in early 2019.What’s important to know is that registering today doesn’t provide you with a download link, but only adds your name to the list of beta testers that will receive the preview build of the new Microsoft Edge when it...

RIP: The Edge is dead... as in the EdgeHTML layout code Microsoft on Thursday said it intends to use the open-source Chromium browser engine in the desktop version of its Edge browser, promising the two per cent of global internet users who favor Edge an improved web experience.Joe Belfiore, corporate veep of Windows, announced the plan, which was reported earlier this week. "Ultimately, we want to make the web experience better for many different audiences," he said. One of those audiences may be macOS users, who despite not clamoring for Edge should have access to Microsoft's browser at some point:...

Grab some popcorn: Redmond has asked for feedbackMicrosoft’s about to test a new feature of Windows 10 that will force users to employ its Edge browser under some circumstances.Revealed in the announcement of Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17623 for Skip Ahead, the change means “we will begin testing a change where links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in Microsoft Edge”.Microsoft’s justification for the change is that Edge is the best, most secure browser on Windows 10.But the change will reportedly override users’ preference for default browser.While that’s naughty in lots of ways and makes Microsoft’s...

Microsoft today asked enterprise customers to test a new anti-malware, anti-exploit technology in Windows 10's baked-in browser. Windows 10's latest preview, tagged as build 16188 and released Thursday, includes Windows Defender Application Guard, a virtualization-based feature that isolates the contents of a tab in Edge, the OS's default browser, from the rest of the system. While Application Guard was announced in September, and went through limited testing in the months since, today marked its first appearance to all Insiders running Windows 10 Enterprise. Users must manually toggle on Application Guard from a setting dialog, then open a tab within Edge...

After Tuesday's big launch of Windows 10 S, it emerged the software will force people to use Edge and Bing. How can that be?The supposedly streamlined operating system aimed at kids and their teachers will only run apps from Microsoft's official Windows 10 S software store. Right now, there are no third-party browsers available from its shelves. That leaves users with the bundled Edge browser and Bing for web search.You can't change the search engine from Bing, and, for now, you can't get another browser besides Edge. Even if you could get another browser, Edge will override all the time,...

Microsoft's bold claims about Edge turn out to be true. If you want to watch true 1080p content on Netflix over your PC, you need to use Microsoft’s Edge browser. On Wednesday, Microsoft claimed that its Edge browser was the only one of the big four browsers—which also includes Chrome, Firefox, and Opera—to offer 1080p resolution while playing Netflix content. A quick test of all four browsers by PCWorld proved this claim to be true, with the other three browsers capped at 720p. Why this matters: Microsoft’s been busy trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Edge, which suffered after the...

Good news for Windows 10 users: you can now block internet ads in the Edge browser just like those with Chrome and Firefox do! Extensions for both the AdBlock and AdBlock Plus services have come to Microsoft's new browser, and are now available on the Windows Store. There is one small requirement, however, and it's that users need to be Windows Insiders with build 14291 on the desktop. Non-Insider users will still need to wait until this summer to take advantage of extensions in Edge, when the Anniversary Update for Windows 10 is released to the public. Once that's out,...

It's possible that you reached this article purely by chance, or you may have Googled 'how to change the default search engine in Microsoft Edge'. However you got here, the fact that you're reading this indicates that you're either interested in Windows 10's Edge, or actively use it -- and this means there's something you need to know. If you fall into the latter camp and use Edge's InPrivate mode to cover your online tracks, you might want to think about changing your web browser. Edge has already got some stick for its lack of extension support -- "it's coming,...

With its engineers involved in more than 2,000 open source projects, you'd have to agree that open source has more than a foothold at Microsoft these days. Most recently, for example, the browser team made the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers both Edge and Internet Explorer open source, for a very practical reason. Node, the popular JavaScript runtime, currently works only with Google's V8 JavaScript engine. With Chakra now open source, Microsoft can take the fork of Node that it created to run on Chakra and contribute it back to the project -- which means developers who use Node will...

January 13 is the last day for business and individual users to move off older versions of the Internet Explorer web browser, before Microsoft pulls the plug on support including security patches. The deadline this week comes 18 months after Microsoft warned that it would cease to support Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10, giving users time to upgrade. Microsoft suggests users upgrade to Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 7 and 8.1, or use the new Edge browser if they're on Windows 10. Edge is able to launch Internet Explorer 11 when needed, for backwards compatibility.

Web scum foiled in Win 10 net ship. Microsoft has nixed the ability for its Edge browser to run unsigned dynamic link libraries (DLLs) in a move that will make life hard for dodgy extensions and ad injector merchants. Edge senior program manager Crispin Cowan says the update was dropped last week in the latest Windows 10 update and follows Redmond's plan to harden its web browsing asset. Last May Microsoft killed ActiveX and Browser Helper Objects making Edge faster and more stable, Cowan says. "Web browsers are an attractive target, because in-browser advertisements can be a significant source of...

Microsoft's new browser, Edge is racking up some performance wins over the competition but still falls short in certain areas. When browsing the web, few things matter to users as much as how quickly a page loads.Nearly half of web users questioned said they expect a site to load within two seconds or less and much of the success of Google's Chrome browser is put down to its speed.Making pages nippier is an area that Microsoft has focused on since launching its new Edge browser for Windows 10 in March.Microsoft's efforts appeared to be paying off by this May, when...

Microsoft is using a new tactic to keep Windows 10 users from switching away from its Edge browser. The first time Edge users search for “chrome” or “firefox” using Bing — presumably with the intent of downloading those browsers from Google or Mozilla, respectively — they are shown a serious-looking message at the top of the search results. “Microsoft recommends Microsoft Edge for Windows 10,” it says. A “Learn why” button next to that message brings you to a website showing off Edge’s features... The message only showed up the first time I searched for “chrome” and “firefox” in Edge,...

Mozilla plans a campaign to stop or slow desertions from Firefox to Windows 10's new Edge browser because the OS's express setup changes previous defaults to Edge during an upgrade, according to published documents. Edge, introduced in Windows 10, will be the default browser out of the box. In fact, according to Mozilla -- supported by a video that showed what happened when Windows 7 was upgraded to Windows 10's build 10162 of July 2 -- those who upgrade by selecting "Express Settings," as most do, will find Edge the default even if they had previously specified a competitor like...

With Microsoft Edge, we want to fundamentally improve security over existing browsers and enable users to confidently experience the web from Windows. We have designed Microsoft Edge to defend users from increasingly sophisticated and prevalent attacks. This post covers some of the advanced technologies used to protect Microsoft Edge, including industry leading sandboxing, compiler, and memory management techniques developed in close partnership with Windows. Web Security Threats While the web is predominantly a safe environment, some sites are designed to steal money and personal information. Thieves by nature don’t care about rules, and will use any means to take advantage...

Original full title/subtitle:Microsoft's secret weapon in browser wars: Mozilla's supercharged Asm.js Native-speed JavaScript available now in Windows 10's Edge browser Microsoft has included a surprise feature in its new Edge web browser for Windows 10, in the form of support for the ultra-optimizable Asm.js JavaScript dialect. First developed by Mozilla and championed by the nonprofit's former CTO Brendon Eich, Asm.js is a strict subset of JavaScript that aims to be the "assembly language of the web." By eliminating many of the vagaries of the JavaScript language syntax, Asm.js forces client-side web code into a form that is easy for Just-In-Time...