Microsoft’s Johnathan Norman says that the company is hard at work creating a safer environment and that we will have nothing to worry about in the future. So, taking into consideration all external factors that can endanger user data in any shape or form, Microsoft is working on new ingenious ways to keep the bad guys out.

Microsoft is working on a Super Duper Secure Mode for Edge

As Norman so eloquently explains, most Chromium-based web browser exploits target Google’s V8 JavaScript rendering engine because of JavaScript engine bugs. The issues provide powerful exploit primitives, there is a steady stream of bugs, and exploitation of these bugs often follows a straightforward template. Normal also adds that the JavaScript engines are a remarkably difficult security challenge for browsers. In order to fight this problem, Edge’s upcoming Super Duper Secure Mode would disable the JavaScript engine’s Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation technology, which speeds up JavaScript workloads dramatically and makes this scripting language roughly as performant as native C++ code. All this is because obtaining this level of performance requires a lot of complexity, which provides hackers with lots of places to pry for vulnerabilities. It seems like this change would also lead to a dramatically slower Microsoft Edge, some would say. And although that’s not completely farfetched, Norman says that users with JIT disabled rarely notice a difference in their daily browsing, in testing. The performance degradation across multiple tasks ranged from no change at all to 16.9 percent, along with an average 11 percent increase in power consumption and a 2.3 percent increase in memory usage. The above-mentioned change impacts the popular Speedometer 2.0 benchmark by as high as 58 percent. Microsoft plans to investigate its Super Duper Secure Mode experiment over the next few months and determine whether making it available publicly in Edge is beneficial enough. If you’re interested in testing Super Duper Secure Mode, you can do so now with Edge Canary, Dev, and Beta. Just enable the Super Duper Secure Mode in edge://flags, and then send Microsoft your feedback using the Feedback menu in Edge. What’s your opinion on this new security feature? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

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