Microsoft Edge has gained in popularity in recent years, since the introduction of Bing Chat and the company’s push for generative AI. This growth of his fame has brought him a small externality: there are more eyes scrutinizing what this browser does without it being obvious to us. Not necessarily for malicious purposes, but with consequences that may make the user uncomfortable.
Already in 2021 we learned for example that informed Microsoft of all the searches we did, whatever the browser. A setting that could be disabled, but it was there, by default, after all. Or that when choosing the option “show password” converted it into plain text and therefore also sent it to the cloudunder the autocorrect function.
Now there is another find in that same line.
Images to improve
This is the function that Edge integrates to improve the images of the websites we browse that are in low resolution. When it detects an image like this, it takes care of making them somewhat sharper and brighter.
This is something that can be intuited to be done locally, using the resources of our own browser; but as he points neowin, it is not: the images are sent to Microsoft servers. Not just the ones that the browser considers need improvement, but all of them. Then the process is applied, so yes, only to those that require it.
In any case, this is something that we can deactivate if we feel that the benefit of this automatic tool is not worth the fact that we are sending all the images that pass through our browser to external servers.
Adjustment inside Edge, with the mentioned adjustment boxed in green. Image: Xataka.
It is deactivated in the Edge settings, and then by going to “Privacy, search and services”. At the end, in the last block, the option to turn off automatic image enhancement appears.
Another similar function that Edge integrates into its Canary version, announced just three months ago, is “video super resolution” which is responsible for improving the quality and sharpness of pixelated or low-resolution videos. In this case, it does use local resources, on the computer, instead of sending the content to Microsoft.
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Featured Image | Microsoft, Mockups Studio, Xataka.
