Microsoft Edge, true to its name, may have found another way to gain an edge over Google Chrome. The newly revealed browser change indicates that Microsoft is looking to combat the worst part of the Internet: annoying videos that play automatically on websites. You know those clips that no one asked for that seem to scratch the record needle in your brain when they suddenly start playing?

The news comes from Techdows, which points out a change in the Canary (pre-beta) build of Chromium-based Edge: there are two settings for media autoplay in Edge: in new versions of the browser, the latter is the default The latter is the default in newer versions of the browser. To try it yourself, make sure you have Edge build 91.0.841.0 or higher.

As you may have guessed, "restrict" is not the same as "block. There was a "block" option, but it is now locked behind a flag that must be enabled first. And apparently it has never actually worked correctly. Nevertheless, this may just be a test. Beta versions of products often only show what a company is trying to do, not what it will do in the long run.

That said, there is no reason why Edge shouldn't get serious about autoplay. If Microsoft launches an ad campaign to disrupt Chrome's autoplay videos, it would probably be the biggest moment in the browser's current short history.

On the other hand, as Chrome users know because they use Google's web browser on a daily basis, the software has no such default. Perhaps this is because Google is no more than an online advertising-based company. No one can say for sure, as Google itself has not revealed the reason for this.

This is (apparently) the latest in a series of efforts by Microsoft to poke at Chrome's near monopoly in the browser market. Recently, Edge added vertical tabs for more economical use of screen space and its own password manager.

Nevertheless, Edge currently accounts for only 3.45% of the global browser market (according to statcounter). Put another way, Chrome has 18.59 times Edge's market share. This is a huge gap that must be recovered.