News

Microsoft Tweaks Edge Browser in New Windows 10 Test Build

• By Kurt Mackie
• May 20, 2015

Microsoft on Wednesday rolled out the next technical preview build of Windows 10 to "fast-ring" testers.

Build 10122 is now available to qualifying Windows Insider program testers via the Windows Update service. Gabriel Aul, general manager of Microsoft's OSG Data and Fundamentals team, indicated in a Twitter post that "some languages (as well as language packs) will take longer to roll out."

Windows 10 builds are now becoming more polished and stable, according to Aul, in Microsoft's announcement. The company is aiming for a final product release sometime this summer.

This release has a known issue that will cause Microsoft's Edge browser (formerly code-named "Spartan") to frequently crash when used with machines that have AMD graphics processor units. Aul suggested that fast-ring testers should switch to the slow-ring group if that's an obstacle. Microsoft almost held off releasing this build because of that issue.

Other known issues include a problem with Cortana speech recognition and an installation problem (error code 0x80070057 - 0x20007). The installation problem happens due to an internal limit on the migration of device INF files, which are used for installing drivers. Testers can try running the Disk Cleanup tool to remove those INF files as a workaround.

Many of the changes highlighted by Aul with this release are associated with refining the user interface. In particular, the Edge browser now has a new tab page. Microsoft set it to be the default homepage in this release to get more feedback. The Edge browser also gets a few feature additions. It gets an InPrivate browsing mode, which doesn't track a user's browsing history. Web sites can be pinned to Start. It has a history view feature, plus a few other enhancements.

Windows 10 has a new way of indicating default applications to end users. It's less verbose. Aul explained that after a user installs a photo viewer, they'll see a dialog box indicating the default viewer app. It'll show when they go to open a file, for instance. Previously, this approach just applied to Windows Store-type apps in Windows 10, but it'll apply to "classic" Windows apps, too, he explained.