Microsoft Edge 106 improves its “web protection” with Microsoft Defender SmartScreen

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edge 1000x600.jpg
edge 1000x600.jpg

Microsoft Edge 106 is the new version of the software giant’s web browser, the second most popular in the world in the multiplatform field and the second most prominent among the Chromium derivatives that are swarming on the market. Thus, after the launch of Chromium 106 and having ignored Chrome 106 due to the lack of news, we look at it.

And it is that despite the fact that both Chromium and Chrome 106 are more of a version because it was time -now the main browsers release a new version per month- than out of conviction, read for the desire to present news of interest to the user, this is not it means that those who come after him are reduced to making the comparsa, as we saw a few days ago with Brave 1.44, another Chromium derivative that arrived a little earlier and well equipped for the rest.

It should be noted, on the other hand, that Chromium/Chrome 106 did bring news, several of which extend to all its derivatives, since they are optimizations and internal improvements of the browser, as well as security patches, and all of this results in full on the spectrum of Chromium variants, which today are, with the exception of Firefox and Safari, basically everything out there.

Speaking of Microsoft Edge 106, the new version of the browser receives all those optimizations and patches and also integrates its own, as is usual in the Edge environment, introducing new policies and removing those that are obsolete. Among others, the one that is proposed as the most outstanding novelty of this release: the improvement of the Microsoft Defender SmartScreen supportwhich is now when it becomes really useful, although its focus is mainly on the professional segment.

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microsoft defender

For more information, Microsoft Defender SmartScreen is a security feature that is deployed with the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system, Windows 11 22H2 and that was already seen in Microsoft Edge 103, but it starts with this version the new implementation of this function. Specifically, the new policy replaces the previous one, which will be definitively withdrawn in the next version of the browser.

Going to the point, what is this Microsoft Defender SmartScreen and what does it have to do with Microsoft Edge? As we explained at the time, Microsoft Defender SmartScreen is «a cloud-based anti-phishing and anti-malware service that alerts users when they enter their credentials into malicious apps or hacked websites«. With such a history, then, it is not surprising that its integration has been extended to the web browser, starting with Microsoft Edge.

It also remains to be seen how exactly the integration works and to what extent other browsers are understood, knowing how Microsoft spends them in this regard.

Finally, Microsoft Edge 106 introduces another innovation, of much less depth, such as the expansion of the number of work results in the address bar, “from 2 to 4, which offers greater visibility of the work content available to you while search”; although it is a change that depends on the activation of a policy available to system administrators or, for that matter, manual activation for the user.