14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just released the very first build of Microsoft Edge 85 in the Dev channel, and unsurprisingly, there are only small changes this time, albeit the new update also comes with a series of welcome fixes and notable known issues.
First and foremost, there’s just one new feature in Microsoft Edge Dev 85.0.531.1, as Microsoft has added a setting to enable preloading of certain webpages.
While this doesn’t sound like much at first glance, it actually is, as preloading means searching and browsing are substantially faster because specific content is loaded in advance.
There are obviously lots of bug fixes, and you can check out the full changelog in the box after the jump.
But also worth knowing is that this build comes with a series of known issues, and one of them concerns Kaspersky antivirus software.
“Users of the Kaspersky Internet Suite who have the associated extension installed may sometimes see webpages like Gmail fail to load. This failure is due to the main Kaspersky software being out of date, and is thus fixed by making sure the latest version is installed,” Microsoft explains.
Dev build only for testing
So if you run Kaspersky security software with the official extension, just make sure that everything is up-to-date so that all pages load correctly in the browser.
Needless to say, Microsoft Edge Dev isn’t the most stable browser, and this is the purpose of the Dev channel in the first place. It’s a build that’s only supposed to be used for testing, and all the changes that Microsoft is currently experimenting with should make their way to the stable channel at some point in the coming weeks.
For the time being, you can download Microsoft Edge Dev and use it side by side with the stable version if you want to give all of these a try, and this is possible both on Windows and macOS.