Microsoft pushes the new Microsoft Edge to unsupported Windows 7 systems
Microsoft ended support for the company's Windows 7 operating system in January 2020 officially. The company provides Enterprise and business customers with options to extend support for up to three years, but did not provide a similar offering to home customers.
Windows 7, which was in extended support for the five years prior to January 2020, has not received updates since January and before that only security updates.
Microsoft did release the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge web browser for Windows 7 in January -- a day after support ended officially to be precise -- and seems to have started to push the new browser to unsupported Windows 7 systems recently.
The update is intended for Home devices only. Microsoft notes that Enterprise devices as well as any device that uses Active Directory or Azure Active Directory will not receive the new Microsoft Edge web browser via Windows Update.
This update is not intended to target Enterprise devices. Specifically, this update targets devices that run Windows 7 SP1 or later versions and Windows 8.1 or later versions that are either Home, Professional, Ultimate, Starter, or Core editions. Devices that run these editions on Active Directory or Azure Active Directory domain are also excluded from this automatic update.
Business devices that were signed up to receive Extended Security Updates (ESU) will receive the update as well as Microsoft does not exclude these devices from receiving the new Microsoft browser via Windows Update.
The Chromium-based Microsoft Edge web browser will only be made available on Windows 7 if the following is true:
- The SHA-2 update from September 23, 2019 or a later SHA-2 update needs to be installed and the system needs to have been restarted at least once.
- The Servicing Stack Update released on March 12, 2019 or later Servicing Stack Updates need to be installed as well.
The new web browser won't replace Internet Explorer on the device it is installed on. Edge will be pinned to the Windows taskbar and a shortcut will be placed on the desktop. The update won't change the default browser on the system either.
Closing Words
Windows 7 devices have a sizeable market share, still, and most major browser makers still support the unsupported operating system. Microsoft did release the new Edge for Windows 7 when it came out in January 2020, and it makes sense, probably, to push it to Windows 7 devices from a business point of view.
Home users on the other hand may not like the move, considering that Microsoft did not provide them with an option to get continued support for the operating system.
Now You: Are you still on Windows 7? Have you tried the new Edge?
Microsoft illegally installs edge chromium on my windows 7 computer without my knowledge or permission, will be talking to FCC and a lawyer, because it has caused nothing but problems with a computer that was working just fine.
Looks like Windows 8.1 has been added to the option to install Edge now as well. It appears as a download option above this month’s KB patch articles. ABP+ reports 286 ads on the support page alone. Enough to put anyone off for life.
Oh, and I had to switch back to ABP+ since UBO is no longer supported on Waterfox Classic unfortunately. Seems to do the job anyway so I’m not worried.
Windows Edge. Huh. With the billions of dollars they enjoy, why would M$ have to use something of Google’s? Truly pathetic.
I remember @Bobo there’s no hiding Silverlight. Just put the Windows update service to manual and disable the Diagnostic Tracking Service.
Use Acrylic DNS Proxy to block all Microsoft and Windows domains.
Microsoft can’t touch my Win 10 and Win 7 forever.
I’m still using Windows 7 and will continue to. In Windows 7 I actually have control of my computer. I can right click and hide that KB. In Windows 10 you have no control.
Precisely! ——- Nuff Said!
I hid that “update” faster than the devil in the night! ..now let’s see if that’s the last I hear from that garbage or will Redmond go all SILVERLIGHT on my a**? Anyone remember THAT supercrap and the millions of times it popped up in windows update?
quite a smart move from MS. Slow and controlled user-friendly rollout during the year with the goal to have the new browser as a standard on all systems at one point in autumn. Until then they probably try to get as much user feedback as possible to increase user retention.
this offers the possibility for edge to become a chrome competitor by the end of this year.
There are still some annoying bugs in the current chromium edge version, so it’s a good move to roll this out slowly. also interesting to see what enormous project creating a browser is even if the engine is already there. No wonder Mozilla isn’t able to really keep up with the front end developments if even MS needed almost two years to create a chromium based browser.
There’s no reason to continue to use chrome on Windows except for those who need to be logged into a google account while browsing.
I have no trust left in Micro$oft at all.
Nice thing about Windows 7 is that it’s easy to change your Windows Update setting so that it will never check for updates unless you tell it to. No only that, but you can hide individual updates so that they’re no longer listed as being available. I have Windows 10 on my laptop, Windows 7 on this desktop. I’ve tried Edge on my laptop, was totally unimpressed. In fact, as unimpressed as I am with Google Chrome. Frankly, I’m using Pale Moon as my default browser. Every once in a while I have to use another browser to correctly view a website, but I can live with that.
I find that too many sites on Pale Moon were either no longer working properly or moving sluggishly now, compared to Waterfox Current, which is running like a dream, to be honest. I tried Edge Chromium when it was in the preview stage last year, and it worked fine, but I didn’t love it.
Since it’s becoming more than the “odd site” with Pale Moon that it’s having difficulty with, so time to side step those odd people over there.
@Judy Thornton:
Last December, Waterfox was sold to System1, a market-research, market-analysis, marketing, and advertising firm registered in the least regulated, least transparent section of the London Stock Exchange. System1 is the same firm that acquired [formerly?] privacy-centric search engine StartPage. Both acquisitions were covered in ghacks articles.
I don’t have the technical chops to vet Waterfox for privacy, and if I did, I wouldn’t want to have to do so each time Waterfox gets updated. But even to someone without deep technical knowledge, it should be obvious that System1’s core financial incentive is to NOT respect user privacy.
Long story short, Waterfox may “run like a dream” for you, but I would no longer trust it to respect your privacy, any more than I would trust Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
As for Pale Moon, Google seems to have a “talent” for “persuading” webdesigners to use new standards and protocols that are initially well supported only by Google Chrome. Pale Moon has a small development team that has a harder team keeping up than vastly better-funded “non-profit” operations like Mozilla. And yes, its developers can be brusque, rude, and impolitic. That said, Pale Moon still works fine on maybe 97% of the sites I visit. It’s more customizable than Chromium- or post-Australis-Firefox-based browsers, it supports more powerful extensions, and it’s never given me reason to doubt its commitment to user privacy. That’s why it remains my primary browser to this day. I can live with having to load the odd site in a different browser a couple times a day. I don’t know that that will last indefinitely — I guess it will depend on how long it takes for Google to fully capture the Web — but I’m holding on for as long as I can.
In the end, users choose between convenience and a genteel marketing front, on the one hand, and actual privacy and control, on the other, and it’s up to each of us to make our own decision.
Anyway, I don’t have a clue whether Moonchild or Matt Tobin are insufficiently anti-racist, but I’m not going to condemn them for staying neutral on this issue on Pale Moon’s website. I may or may not have different motives than they do, but I wouldn’t want to be in the Fortune 500’s exploitative, broadly hypocritical company, either. (A lot more African-American lives are lost each year to poverty and inadequate healthcare than to police killings. When corporate BLM supporters get up in arms about *that*, give me a call.)
ADDITIONAL NOTE ON PALE MOON (the browser itself):
Pale Moon works markedly better since I finally heeded the developers’ advice to uninstall NoScript and purge all traces of it. I dragged my feet for a good year because: (1) I didn’t want to rely solely on uBlock Origin for script-blocking; (2) I was reluctant to dump over a decade of “training” (configuration) invested in NoScript; and (3) I didn’t want to have to start over from scratch with ηMatrix (aka eMatrix, a Pale-Moon-specific fork of uMatrix). It hasn’t been fun training ηMatrix from scratch, but it’s a more granular, site-specific blocker than NoScript, and Pale Moon does in fact run a *lot* better with NoScript gone. I don’t know why, but it *does*. The only thing I miss from NoScript (apart from that decade of configuration) is its built-in domain-vetting tools.
To be honest, I’m not even sure ηMatrix is necessary if you use uBlock Origin in advanced mode and have a good set of subscriptions. I *think* uBlock/uMatrix developer Raymond Hill actually suggested as much at some point. I may simply have a knee-jerk attachment to blacklisting-by-default because I saw friends and relatives who didn’t use script-blockers — even those who used anti-virus “Web protection,” which I didn’t — fall victim to multiple browser-mediated exploits, while I didn’t suffer a single detected exploit in over a decade of using NoScript. In other words, it’s *possible* that my belt-and-suspenders approach to script-blocking is overkill and that most users would be fine with uBlock Origin alone. I’m pretty sure it would be less work!
I agree Palemoon slows down on some sites but I’ve never had a site that didn’t work, can you be more specific on which sites? When I use the toggle Java script add-on Palemoon is as fast as any other browser and more secure but it will break the graphics on some sites which doesn’t bother me, I prefer just to read.
I use ungoogled chromium for some sites like youtube, very fast, but installing extensions is kind of a pain.
See, I just want sites to work as specified, so I no longer see turning off Javascript as a valid option. But Facebook is like mud through it.. I tried Basilisk, and while it’s “better”, it’s still slower than Waterfox Current.
I have no use for fb
Why would he, its a group of jackboots and soon to be terroritst. Haven’t you been paying attention?
Microsoft can kiss my big fat booty.
Blackbird on my win7 eliminated ‘Edge’
back-doors/IP’s quite a while back…this is not anything spectacularly new
Happily running 7 on two machines in my support network. Both are more or less happily running Firefox. If they force their Chrome Clone piece of shit, I’ll have to consider blocking all updates.
It’s an optional update, at the moment. So, you’re safe for now.
The word ‘Targeted’ was dropped by MS in ‘semi-annual channel’ update cadence on Win10 from v1903 onwards, they are now using ‘Targeted’ for all 7/8 & 10 users.
Unsupported Win7 users are also fodder for telemetry, although a lot less than their GWX counterpart, ‘Got Windows X’ users. Thank you MS, I decline the offer of more intrusive vectors via a browser.
I’m sticking with Win7 off line and linux on line.
“Are you still on Windows 7?” : yes
“Have you tried the new Edge?” : no
I’ll be over with Win7 once the PC breaks or once the OS is definitely too old (sites requiring more recent OS as they did with XP), whichever the first.
Concerning Edge, not one chance I ever install it on Win7, very unlikely I ever use it if I ever switch to Win10 (for above reasons) and totally impossible if my next OS is Linux.
I don’t want to be negative but I just don’t happen to trust whatever company of the GAFAM and behave accordingly. When an OS such as Win7 sticks an Advertisement ID on the user’s device, when that OS sticks ads on the very login page, I feel like puking. Period. Win10 is the ultimate of a company’s invasion in a user’s privacy, not to mention that it seems to remain in beta stage some 5 years after its launch : imagine this in the old times of Win 3.x, 95, XP, 7? Society then, especially before Win7, wasn’t addict to the web as it is now and similar half-baked OSs would have strongly reduced what was to become insane addiction. Now that people accept everything companies don’t give a damn if there eternal approximations (MS especially) bother eveyrone. My belief is that Win10 is to an OS what Internet explorer has been (still is here & there!) to browsers : a piece of junk.
@Tom Hawack :
I still use Windows XP Professional 64-bit Edition online and have absolutely no problems with websites online. The security is ofcourse very tight on this system. Almost all current formats online can be viewed thanks to many workarounds. Don’t say XP or XP 64-bit is too old, because it isn’t, as long as You know how to bypass the quirks online….
Try Ubuntu. Install the minimal version, then you add what you want. Regardless of what’s said about it, Ubuntu works well and has LTS versions. You can add whatever desktop you want. I’ve tried many Linux distros, distros from all three major forks and many don’t work well, almost all collect data if you want to provide it and they all have obvious OFF switches. Just a few, all in the same place, nothing like the hundred or so hidden throughout Windows.
Except for the esoteric Linuxes, user interfaces are almost the same as Windows, actually closer to Win 7 than 10’s stupid touchscreen layout. Transition to Linux is very easy.
@ULBoom, you’re pointing what is daunting with Linux, that is the incredible amount of offers, distros and “esoteric Linuxes” which makes it hard find the one you need when you’re a novice. Pointing but also sharing your advice : Ubuntu, which is of course familiar to my ears as I’ve often heard it as an advice here and there. Nevertheless Linux is (or seems to be) a big jump for anyone who assimilates an OS to Microsoft. I hear your word loud and clear and include it in a dedicated text memo I keep for comments, advice, news regarding Linux… in order to be equipped with information for D-Day :=) because D-Day will occur, sooner or later.
ERRATUM :
” When an OS such as Win10 sticks an Advertisement ID”, not Win7 of course.
Will Microsoft continue to provide future updates for Edge to unsupported home users of Windows 7 ?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Sure, Edge gives them data. They don’t care if you use it on win7 or linux (linux version is going to come). They want your web activity for Microsoft Advertising.
So, as I understand the article, Windows 7 users cannot have security updates, but Microsoft will shove whatever they want onto your Windows 7 computer, without your permission, without warning, whenever the mood strikes them or they have some reason of their own to do so.
Microsoft can’t force crap on any Windows 7 user, so long as each Win7 user hasn’t taken the bait and downloaded the bad updates in question.
For those, whom have not yet updated with the new SHA2 updates, it’s not the end of the world (yet!), and, so long as you’re not in a dire need for the latest and greatest from the mother-ship, aka, Microshaft, Googloctopus, Faceblog and Twitduh, then, you’ll be just fine ——- provided of course, that you have a robust security application and proper security policy in place and know how to conduct proper system-hardening, really, there is nothing to fear from Microsoft, except fear itself!
You don’t have to agree with me, but that’s just how Microsoft rolls. They’re sordid history and deceitful rhetoric to boot, are all the evidence one needs to understand that when Microsoft says, ‘Jump!,” …we definitely should not listen! ——- To say the least!
@kalmly
Microsoft also releases security updates for Windows 7 (ESU), they are just withholding them from private users, because they want you to upgrade to Windows 10.
With many in Enterprise still working with Windows 7 and a significant amount of users who either have older hardware that doesn’t support Windows 10 or simply cannot afford a new PC. I think Windows 7 getting Edge Chromium is a good thing. I doubt it was hard for Microsoft to make Edge available to Windows 7. After all its just Chromium with a Microsoft twist.
Seriously, M$, I don’t want your Edge junk on my Windows 7, the push to upgrade to to Windows 10 is bad enough
I was very unhappy with that, enough to delete it. It was more to do with the pretence that it was a mistake, as if you can accidentally add your ref code to some sites, and then the apology which didn’t really tally with the change they then made. However don’t pretend that it’s even close to being in the same league as MS’s continual spying.
Well that explains the weird update, how strange.
“Are you still on Windows 7? … yes on the laptop!
Have you tried the new Edge?” … no!
Updates are definitively blocked with WAU Manager.