One of our favorite activities when using the Internet is web browsing. Without a doubt, we like to visit our favorite web pages, social networks, work with our files in the cloud and more. When carrying out this type of task, what we use on many occasions is a browser. On a desktop computer, the most popular are usually Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. However, Microsoft is taking its work seriously with its new browser, which is going to replace Internet Explorer. In this article, we are going to learn about the “Super Duper” mode of Microsoft Edge to improve security.
The “Super Duper” safe mode
One thing you should know is that this mode called Super Duper is still in testing and will probably end up changing its name. This indicative name of the function it performs is the internal name used by Microsoft engineers to refer to it. We can see it in the following documentation and for that reason we will use this name.
The Microsoft security team found out that the V8 JavaScript engine is to blame for many security flaws. In case you didn’t know, the JavaScript engine uses Just-In-Time (JIT) Compilation to help speed up JavaScript code on websites. However, we ran into a major problem as it opens up some vulnerabilities in the browser.
We obviously use JIT to speed up browsing, however, Microsoft says that disabling it doesn’t always have a negative impact on browser performance. On the other hand, Super Duper safe mode also activates Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) . In this case we find an Intel hardware-based exploit prevention tool that further blocks the browser. Thus, thanks to the reduction in the attack surface, half of the errors that we see in exploits are eliminated and all the remaining errors become more difficult to exploit. You may be interested in these Microsoft Edge extensions to manage your passwords.
How to activate this mode in Edge
Activating Super Duper safe mode is very easy. The first thing we need is to have Microsoft Edge installed on our computer. We can download it for Windows , Linux and Mac operating systems. In this case, we are going to use the Windows version.
The first thing we have to do is launch the Microsoft Edge browser. Then we go to the upper right corner where the icon of the three vertical points is. Next, a menu will be displayed and the option that we have to select is Configuration .
Next, we go to the left side where the main configuration options are. The one that interests us in this case is Privacy, search and services .
Then, we have to scroll down until we reach the Security section. The screen to activate Super Duper is as follows:
As I mentioned before, it is a function in the testing phase and its name may also be changed. In this case for the time being it bears the name Enable security mitigations for a more secure browser experience . What we would have to do to enable it is to activate the box indicated by the green arrow in the image above.
When activating it we see that it offers us two ways: balanced and strict. The Balanced feature will mostly affect web pages that you don’t view often. That means that if there is any performance impact, it won’t be on the websites we regularly visit. On the other hand, the Balanced feature applies to all web pages. This means that we are more likely to notice some slowdowns and issues.
Lastly, we can click on Exceptions and there we can add any web pages that we don’t want Super Duper safe mode to interfere with.
