Microsoft brings Super-Duper Secure mode to Edge for macOS

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft introduced a new, somewhat quirky-named mode for its browser. Dubbed "Super-Duper Secure mode," it intends to improve security in the Chromium-based browser from Microsoft by disabling JIT in the V8 JavaScript engine and applying other security measures. Initially, Super-Duper Secure mode (SDSM) was available in Edge Canary for Windows. It required enabling one of the experimental flags in edge://flags. Later, Microsoft introduced a user-friendly UI for managing the new mode. Because Microsoft Edge is no longer exclusive to Windows and JIT inside V8 is not limited to a single platform, Edge developers now bring Super-Duper Secure Mode to Edge on macOS.

Johnatan Norman, Microsoft Edge Vulnerability Research team lead, announced SDSM for macOS on his Twitter account several days ago. To try how Super-Duper-Secure mode works on macOS, you need to install the Edge Canary version 94.0.992.0 or higher, then enable it using the Super-Duper Secure Mode flag on the edge://flags page.

Besides introducing SDSM for Edge on macOS, developers slightly tweaked how the mode works. Microsoft Edge now allows specific websites to run without Super-Duper Secure mode. For now, it applies to some popular websites, such as Facebook and YouTube. Ultimately, Microsoft wants to give users granular controls over which website work with SDSM and which don't, similarly to how you control exceptions for Sleeping Tabs. According to Johnatan Norman, the idea will take some time to bake, as the Dev team needs to implement the logic behind it and determine optimal defaults.

Although Microsoft makes steady progress improving SDSM in the Edge browser, all the efforts remain experimental. Microsoft will continue evaluating users' feedback and analyze the performance to security ratio when JIT is off. Initial findings and research revealed that regular users notice little to no difference in everyday performance when Microsoft Edge runs with SDSM.

You can learn more about Super-Duper Secure mode in Microsoft Edge in our dedicated article.