What you need to know
- Microsoft Edge Dev now supports Apple's M1 chips.
- The same update that brings M1 chip support also brings a handful of other new features.
- Microsoft also finished the rollout of its Sleeping Tabs feature.
Microsoft continues to roll out support for its apps on Apple's new M1 chips. The latest edition is Microsoft Edge Dev, which is now optimized for the new Apple processors. The team behind Microsoft Edge started talking about M1 chip support in November of last year and has quickly followed it up with this recent update.
The update also brings a handful of other changes. Here's everything that's new, as found in a tech community post from Microsoft:
- Added an option to Share, Copy and Paste Settings to disable enhanced link copying for links on webpages.
- Added filtering capability to Price Comparison.
- Added an icon to the PDF toolbar for Find On Page.
- Added support for verifying digital signatures of PDFs on Mac. Note that this feature is still behind a flag.
- Finished rolling out Sleeping Tabs. For more details, see https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/12/09/sleeping-tabs-beta-performance/.
The ability to disable enhanced link copying for links on webpages is a welcome addition. Many people started using this feature without noticing that it rolled out and wanted a way to turn it off.
With this update, Microsoft also states that it finished its rollout of Sleeping Tabs. The Sleeping Tabs feature greatly reduces memory usage and CPU usage by putting tabs to sleep when they're not in use.
Microsoft rolled out M1 processor support for Microsoft Edge Canary in December 2020, so it appears that the company is working its way through the Edge channels quickly. It might not be that much longer before M1 chip support rolls out to the stable version of Microsoft Edge on macOS.
