Debugging Web Access Issues with Microsoft Edge

Edge comes with Developer Tools (Control-Shift-I).  

These tools are surprisingly powerful. The tools appear right next to the rendered webpage in the browser.

Suppose you are trying to log in to a service called "Microsoft New Service" but it doesn't work.  The tab text says "Sign in to Microsoft New Service". Open up Dev Tools. Click on Network (the wifi-style icon). 

Now reload the webpage.  

You will see entire flow of HTTP requests and responses. A 200 response is status code OK, a 204 means No Content. In fact, any status code between 200 and 299 is a form of success. 300-399 are redirection messages, and anything about that represents an error.

You may be surprised by the number of conditional access-related HTTP requests that are involved in an authentication attempt.

Connoisseur's Guide to JavaScript Engines: V8 Rules

Node.js uses the V8 JavaScript engine which powers Google Chrome (and is open sourced by Google).

Other browsers use their own engine, for example Firefox uses SpiderMonkey and Safari uses JavaScriptCore (aka Nitro). Edge was based on Chakra (a Microsoft project that was open-sourced) before being rebuilt with V8 and Chromium.

Microsoft Edge has an optional WebDriver for Automation

Find out more here. 

Mastering BERT and DistilBERT

This is BERT.  

Introduced in 2018, it stands for "Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers".  A possible simplification of BERT could be "BET" or "Bidirectional Encoding from Transformers".

The "bidirectional" component implies it use context to the left and right of critical words.

It's GLUE score is 80%.

The BERT paper was published by researchers from Google's AI Language group.

Don't know what a GLUE score is? It's a score that evaluates how well a language model understands natural language - and comes from the GLUE benchmark (General Language Understanding Evaluation). It is less used in the "modern" context, as most modern LLMs max out GLUE - they are too good.

This is DistilBERT, introduced in the context of edge computing.

In the paper, the authors also point out "We have made the trained weights available along with the training code in the Transformers library from HuggingFace".

 
It is worthwhile to study BERT as DistilBERT has the same general architecture as BERT.

Built-in Secure VPN for Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge now comes with a free built-in VPN to keep your location private, safeguard sensitive data, fill out forms and more. 

There is an option to automatically use VPN for public wifi. 

The VPN is allegedly powered by CloudFlare and comes with usage limits.

Basic Microsoft Edge Shortcuts

Control-Tab    Enables you to scroll through open tabs

Control-Shift-Tab    Reverse scroll but is quite an unnatural set of keys to press

Control-J    View your downloads

Control-H    View your browsing history

What Version of Microsoft Edge am I using?

Click the three dots in the top right of the Edge browser and click on the Gears. Then click "About Microsoft Edge".

Change File Associations for PDF Files in Windows 10

Windows 10 automatically associates PDF files with the Edge browser. Unfortunately the Edge browser is not a very user-friendly browser.

To change this, go to Settings and select Default Apps, then Choose Default Applications by File Type. The latter feature takes a while to load. The left hand column thus displayed gives the file extension and the right hand column gives the application. Change Edge to Chrome and you are done.

Edge Browser Aligns with Chromium

Development of the Edge browser is now aligned with Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome and Chrome OS (a Linux kernel based operating system sponsored by Google).

Microsoft Edge - The Heir Apparent to Internet Explorer

Microsoft Edge is the default browser for Windows 10, replacing Internet Explorer 11. The browser has an inbuilt PDF reader, Adobe Flash player and low level JavaScript.