Microsoft Edge may have found another way to live up to your name and get a edge about Google Chrome. A recently revealed change in the browser shows that Microsoft is considering taking a stand against the worst part of the internet: those annoying videos that play automatically on websites. You know, those clips that no one ever asked for, that make the proverbial recording needle in your brain scratch when they start playing out of nowhere?
This news comes from Techdows, which notices a change in the Canary build (read: pre-beta) of the Chromium-based Edge. Edge has two settings for Auto Media Play: Allow and Limit, and the new version of the browser shows that the latter is now the default. To try it for yourself, make sure you’re at Edge build 91.0.841.0 or higher.
Limit, as you might have guessed, is not the same as “blocking”. There was an option to Block, but it is now blocked behind a flag that you must first enable. And apparently it never worked right. That said, this may just be a test. Beta versions of products often just show what a company is thought about doing, not what you will do in the long run.
That said, there is no reason why Edge shouldn’t take autoplay more seriously. If Microsoft launched an advertising campaign destroying Chrome autoplay videos, it would probably be the biggest moment in the short history of its current browser.
Meanwhile, as Chrome users know from their daily experiences using the Google browser, this software does not offer this standard. Maybe it’s because Google is nothing more than a company based on online advertising. No one can say for sure, since Google itself has not given a reason.
This is (apparently) the latest in a series of efforts by Microsoft to seize Chrome’s near-monopoly in the browser market. Edge recently added vertical tabs for more economical use of screen space, as well as its own password manager.
That said, Edge currently has only 3.45% of the global browser market (according to the statcounter) – while Chrome has 64.15%. Or, to put it another way, Chrome has 18.59 times more market share than Edge. It is a lot of ground to invent.