After serving users for several years, Microsoft Application Guard bids farewell as the tech giant deprecates the feature. The feature will no longer be available for some Edge for Business users. Nonetheless, they can look for other Edge security options to ensure browser protection.
Microsoft Deprecates Application Guard Feature
As announced recently, Microsoft deprecates the “Application Guard” security feature for Edge for Business users. This deprecation also applies to the Windows Isolated App Launched APIs.
Microsoft’s Application Guard emerged as a dedicated security solution for power users, protecting business apps like Microsoft Office and Edge browser. The feature helps users prevent threats from malicious sites by opening untrusted sites in a sandboxed environment.
This feature first became available for public in 2019 for Edge browsers. Later, Microsoft rolled out its browser extensions for other browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
And now, after serving users for about five years, the feature reaches its end of life as Microsoft confirms no further updates to it.
Nonetheless, it doesn’t mean that the users are left vulnerable. Microsoft urged users to go through the Microsoft Edge for Business whitepaper to find other security options to apply.
While the tech giant hasn’t announced specific reasons for this step, it isn’t surprising since Microsoft previously deprecated the Application Guard for Microsoft Office. At that time also, the firm announced deprecating the Windows Security Isolation APIs. Besides, the tech giant advised users to switch to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint attack surface reduction rules, Protected View, and Windows Defender Application Control.
Besides this Application Guard security feature, Microsoft also announced deprecating other features, including Windows Mixed Reality (including the Mixed Reality Portal app and Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR and Steam VR Beta), Legacy console mode (will only be available as an on-demand feature), and Windows speech recognition, which Microsoft has replaced with Voice Access. The deprecating features will no longer be updated and won’t be available for future releases.
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