Microsoft’s Chromium version fo the Edge browser receives updates every single day. While not all updates are major ones, every single one of them holds quite the significance. For those of you who are unaware of what we’re talking about, here’s a quick refresher course.

Microsoft Edge Chromium

Microsoft, in the hope to form a good web browser, integrated its Edge browser with the Chromium platform, the same one Chrome is developed on. This does mark a big step for Microsoft, given that in the past, Internet Explorers have not maintained a good repo. Perhaps it was this development that led people to actually prefer the Edge Chromium platform. Not only does it give a comfortable environment for those who are used to Chrome, but it also works flawlessly on Windows Machines.

Now that users understand what the Edge Chromium browser is, it is imperative to know a big problem at hand. Today, in a cash intensive browsing experience, we have pre-loaded stuff. Chrome, for example, upon searching for images, loads the entire page so that users do not face image loading. Same goes for videos on pages. This preloading helps in a smooth browsing experience. While it sounds quite good, not everything is that easy going. This preloading protocol holds its pros and cons. Discussing the cons and we see a heavy level of data usage. While some users can afford a capless data connection, not everyone has that luxury. Similarly, not everyone has a fast, fibre optic connection. Auto loading and preloading take up additional bandwidth which causes trouble in browsing.

To stop this unwanted playback of videos, we see Microsoft Edge Chromium with the solution. In between all the random updates be it security or otherwise, we see something quite interesting. According to a report by TechDows, Microsoft developers have introduced the feature to limit or completely block auto loading on video sites. Although this is true for most sites, famous sites like Netflix or Youtube have been exempted from the functionality. While currently, the Block feature of the auto loading is available now on the regular version of the Edge browser, it is just the Canary version of Edge Chromium which has the limit feature to it too.

How this works is that Edge detects any video ready to be played which is carrying sound. It then blocks its request to the ISP until and unless the user allows it by clicking on it. What this does is that it kills the annoying factor of sites which autoplay videos which users simply do not want. Another thing is that a hit on your data is avoided. For users who wish to enable this feature on Edge, they can do so in Advanced Settings on the browser. For Canary users, they can search for the feature in flags and enable from there.