Microsoft Edge it’s a browser that, since abandoning the historic rendering engine to embrace the Chromium source code, has started to gain significant market share. Of course, 5.3% of the market (source: StatCounterMay 2023) Edge’s prerogative is still a long way from 63% of Google Chrome but the trend is still growing. A good portion of users appreciate the new features introduced, although there has been some concern that Edge sends images a Microsoft.
Edge can count on the fact that it is closely related to the Windows system. The results of web searches made using the Windows 10 search box and Windows 11, for example, are always opened with Edge. And that regardless of default browser that the user has chosen to configure on his machine. Indeed, Microsoft has declared war on programs that want to replace Edge.
SuperRes and Video Super Resolution: optimization of images and videos
Back in September 2022 we had referenced the addition of an interesting new feature in Edge: SuperRes o Enhance images Microsoft Edge. It takes care of improving the images published on the Web by increasing their size resolution thanks to the use of artificial intelligence. The model used by Microsoft also examines the chromatic aspectsthe contrast and the lighting of each image present in the Web pages and provides to optimize it.
A few months later, in March 2023, the Redmond company also presented the new Video Super Resolution feature which uses the computational power of the graphics card to improve resolution and the quality of the videos played by the browser.
Edge sends all images to Microsoft
With function SuperRes enabled, images on web pages are always automatically sent to server Microsoft. This happens for all images and photos that the browser downloads renderingduring any online browsing session.
In the browser setup phase, Microsoft explicitly indicates that Edge can transfer images on remote servers. However, the description is lost among the many other Edge features that are illustrated at first start. For many users, therefore, SuperRes is enabled per default.
After opening the browser Microsofttry typing edge://settings/privacy in the address bar then scroll through the many options presented, until you find Enhance images in Edge. By deactivating the corresponding option, no image shown by Edge during the online browsing will no longer be forwarded to Microsoft.
In these hours it seems that Microsoft has already taken charge of user complaints by deactivating the function by default Enhance images in Edge.
The opening image is taken from iStockphoto and is used under license.