How Microsoft Edge Updates

By default, Edge will update in the background automatically while you’re not using it. Open Microsoft Edge and you’ll be using the latest version.

However, if Edge is already running and an update becomes available, an update notifier icon will show in the Edge toolbar. When you see the update notifier (a green or red arrow on the … button):

… this means an update is ready for use and you simply need to restart the browser to have it applied.

While you’re in this state, if you open Edge’s application folder, you’ll see the new version sitting side-by-side with the currently-running version:

When you choose to restart:

…either via the prompt or manually, Edge will rename and restart with the new binaries and remove the old ones:

In addition to cleaning up the old binaries, the newly-started Edge instance verifies if any data migration needs to take place (e.g. if the user profile database structure has been changed) and performs that migration.

The new instance restarts using Chromium’s session restoration feature, so all of your tabs, windows, cookies, etc, are right where you left them before the update (akin to typing edge://restart in the omnibox).

This design means that the new version is ready to go immediately, without the need to wait for any downloads or other steps that could take a while or go wrong along the way. This is important, because users who don’t restart the browser will continue running the outdated version (even for new tabs or windows) until they restart, and this could expose them to security vulnerabilities.

Three Group Policies give administrators control of the relaunch process, including the ability to force a restart.

Threat Management / Software Inventory

Unfortunately, this design can cause some confusion for Enterprise Software Inventory / Threat Management products, because they will typically check the version of the current msedge.exe file on disk. That version may be outdated pending the launch of the browser which will perform the replacement process.

For example, if the msedge.exe is on version 119.0.2112.0, but version 119.0.2213.0 is currently staged as new_msedge.exe, your Software Inventory tool might incorrectly complain that the user has an outdated version of Edge until the user launches the browser once.

Manually vs. Automatic Update Check

Users can trigger a check for updates by clicking … > Help & Feedback > About Microsoft Edge or navigating to edge://settings/help.

If that doesn’t work (e.g. because Edge crashes before navigating anywhere) fear not — Edge’s Update Service will install a new release within a few hours of it becoming available. If you’d like to speed it along, you can ask the Updater to update Edge Canary thusly:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\EdgeUpdate\MicrosoftEdgeUpdate.exe" "/silent /install appguid={65C35B14-6C1D-4122-AC46-7148CC9D6497}&appname=Microsoft%20Edge%20Canary&needsadmin=False"

If you instead wanted to update Stable, the command line would be

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\EdgeUpdate\MicrosoftEdgeUpdate.exe" -argumentlist "/silent /install appguid={56EB18F8-B008-4CBD-B6D2-8C97FE7E9062}&appname=Microsoft%20Edge&needsadmin=True"

Beware Fake Updates from websites

If a website claims that you need to install a browser update to continue, don’t do it, it’s a scam! Websites sometimes are compromised by malicious ads pretending to be a browser update, in the hopes that you’ll download and run their malicious software. Edge (and Chrome) never distribute updates in this way.

-Eric

Technical Appendix

Chromium’s code for renaming the new_browser.exe binary can be seen here. When Chrome is installed at the machine-wide level, Chromium’s setup.exe is passed the --rename-chrome-exe command line switch, and its code performs the actual rename.

Edge’s background updater uses a variety of approaches to ensure that it’s available to install a new version upon release: