After the major announcements from the Surface event, Edge got a new look and a new engine with the October 2018 Update and makes this the best Edge yet, according to a new Windows Edge blog post. This version has been incremented to EdgeHTML 18 (Microsoft EdgeHTML 18.17763). It’s faster, it’s better, and has new features and enhancements which make it easier to find all your options.
You can download the October Update now by checking windows update in settings to get the latest Microsoft Edge version or you can use the media assistant or download the media creation tool for a fresher start.
What is new in the best Edge yet?
New look and feel, functionality are better across the board including updated menu and settings UI so you can customize the way you want it to be and find those options faster and easier with “Show in Toolbar” and take control of media auto-playing on websites.
You can get started in Settings under “Advanced” > “Media Autoplay,” where you’ll find three options: Allow, Limit, and Block.
Password-less experience is also available with a new Web Authentication API (WebAuthN) which enables better and “more secure user experiences by replacing passwords” so we can now use Windows Hello with your websites. Windows Hello enables you to use your face, fingerprint, PIN or FIDO2, FIDO U2F Security Keys to login to websites easily which are becoming popular ways to sign on but these security keys could get lost or you forget where you put them, but at the time of writing, I can’t see any mention of using the Windows Authenticator app on your phone.
There is a whole host of improvements for Developers too:
- New Autoplay Policies
- Service Worker improvements
- CSS, background blend, and overscroll
- Chakra Improvements
- Developer Tools
- Web Notifications
- Support for several commonly known APIs
- Progressive Web Apps
- Webview- Service workers, win32 webview updates and WebDriver Improvements
For Developers that need to test their sites in Edge quickly and from different platforms, you can now run free testing through a Virtual Machine provided by Microsoft, though they are working on it to bring you the latest image so check back at the blog post soon.
Check out more details in the official blog post
