Microsoft has released a new update for the stable channel of the Edge browser to version 98, as usual, after four weeks of the previous version, with a set of new features and security improvements to enable users to browse the Internet safely, and with the latest web technologies available.
The first feature that Edge 98 brings is the new "Enhance Your Web Security" mode, a browsing mode where browser security takes priority, giving users an extra layer of protection when browsing the web, and helping protect them from in-the-wild exploits (also referred to 0-days).
In Edge 98, Users can also set up their browser to automatically open websites with a specific profile. Users who have multiple Edge profiles (personal and work profile) can set, for example, the school or company website to open in the work profile automatically, and social network websites to open in the personal profile.
The new Microsoft browser update comes with an Edge bar feature for Windows 10 and 11 users, which is a bar that you can pin to your desktop to get the latest and trending news based on your interests. This bar is similar to the News and Interests feature in Windows 10 and the widgets feature in Windows 11, and you can customize your interests by pressing a pen button at the bottom of the bar.
The bar also contains shortcuts to some Microsoft services and sites such as Outlook, Bing, and LinkedIn, and you can add a shortcut to your favorite sites as well.
The Edge bar can be enabled either by going to the edge://settings/edgeBar page or by clicking on the three dots Edge menu in the top right → More tools → Launch Edge bar.
Edge 98 comes also with new overlay-based design scrollbars, similar to Windows 11 ones. This new design is not turned on by default, and you must enable it via the edge://flags/#edge-overlay-scrollbars-win-style flag.
The browser comes with a "#force-major-version-to-100" experiment flag in edge://flags, to let site owners test the upcoming three-digit version number in user agent string to make sure their website will work as expected, as starting with version 100, Microsoft Edge will send a three-digit version number in the User-Agent header, which may break some websites.
Last, Microsoft Edge 98 deprecates the legacy WebRTC's Plan B Session Description Protocol (SDP) semantics. This SDP format is being replaced by the Unified Plan, which is a spec-compliant and cross-browser compatible SDP format.
The Edge browser is included by default in Windows 11 and recent versions of Windows 8.1 and 10, and it keeps updating constantly in the background, so if you're on one of these versions, you should have gotten this Edge update already. On other operating systems, you can check and get this update by going to edge://settings/help if you're on macOS, or through your system's update manager if you're on Linux. Alternatively, you can also download the latest version of Microsoft Edge from here.
