Microsoft’s Edge browser can be considered a success for the software giant as it has steadily grown in popularity ever since Microsoft switched it over to the Chromium open-source project, making it compatible with everything that runs on the Google Chrome ecosystem. Unfortunately, however, this also opens the browser up to the multitude of security issues that come with the world’s most popular operating system. This could be why Microsoft appears to be beefing up security on Edge. Let’s take a look.
As well as the usual bug fixes, performance tweaks, and general updates found in updated versions of browsers, testers have found an interesting security update in the new Microsoft Edge browser beta version 104.0.1293.44.
Edge offers users two different default security settings to choose from. Balanced mode adds security mitigations for sites that you don’t visit that often in a way to ensure that most sites work as the web developers intended. Strict mode does the same but ramps up the protections for all sites, including the ones you visit regularly, and doesn’t make promises about web page performance, also prioritizing security.
At the moment, Balanced mode is the default choice for all users and you actually have to activate the feature to be able to choose between them. The latest update will change this, however, enabling all users to activate the feature and select Strict mode as their default choice. Of the news Microsoft said:
“Enhance your security on the web. Improvements to Enhance your security on the web in edge://settings/privacy now include Basic as the new default option. With this option, Microsoft Edge will apply added security protection to the less visited sites. This preserves the user experience for the most popular sites on the web. For more information, see Browse more safely with Microsoft Edge.”
The move from Microsoft allows security-minded web users to bump up their security by disabling features such as the Just-in-time compiler, which makes it much harder for malicious websites and scammers to get malware onto their devices via their web browsers.
In other recent Microsoft Edge news, it looks like Microsoft is bringing more Windows features into the browser.
