'MacBook became hot as hell in a couple of minutes': Nasty Edge bug hit macOS, but it's fixed

Mac owners have been suffering at the hands of a bug in Edge that Microsoft had flagged up by a tester, but didn't fix, and the glitch made it into the release version of the browser.

The good news is that it has now been fixed with the latest release of Edge, which is version 144.0.3719.115, as spotted by Neowin.

Microsoft notes on the changelog:

"Fixed a macOS issue that caused Microsoft Edge to fully saturate one CPU core under certain conditions."

While it's seemingly causing just one processor core to be pushed to the max, some reports suggest they are seeing a greater level of activity than that across the CPU. At any rate, whatever's going on inside the processor has been causing a good deal of frustration for some MacBook owners, with complaints about laptops overheating, fans spinning up, and battery life getting seriously diminished.

As you can see in the Reddit thread highlighted above, 'strigov' posted to say:

"Experienced same issue yesterday on my wife's MBA. 4 tabs, including video site. 100% and it's not '1-core' moment - Mac became hot as hell, like when it's about 80-90 C on SoC, in a couple of minutes. Closing all tabs didn't help, only Cmd+Q."

Another Redditor added:

"And it kills battery life majorly. I've never seen anything like it. It's leaving a few errors in syslog, but it doesn't seem to point out what exactly the culprit is."

A late heal

While it's cured now, as mentioned at the outset, this problem was discovered by a tester and flagged as a bug to Microsoft some two months ago in a preview build of Edge. (Actually, it was reported as a bug across all testing channels, meaning Canary, Dev, and Beta, with the macOS version of the browser).

Yet despite that warning, the gremlin went unaddressed and made it to the release candidate of Microsoft's browser. There were also multiple reports across Microsoft's Learn portal last month, too.

So how did this one slip the bug squashing net? Well, that's a very good question and we can only guess - but more widely, this failure is reflective of the general bugginess witnessed with Windows 11 of late.

It's particularly worrying that a bug of obvious gravity, causing the CPU to rev up to the point of a MacBook overheating, was missed even after it was pointed out to Microsoft.

Microsoft is currently on a crusade to right the wrongs with Windows 11 in general, and the apps within the OS - which includes Edge - so this isn't a good look. Of course, it's Edge running on macOS, which is obviously something of a niche case, but still - the software giant needs to be more on the ball than this.

The following months are going to be critical for Microsoft in terms of correcting the current perception of Windows 11 as overly buggy, particularly given the poor start to the year we've had with the January update.

We have been given promises that slow performance and bugs will be dealt with in Windows 11 as a matter of priority, and now we need to see the results. And what we definitely don't need to see is Microsoft fumbling the ball with an obvious Edge bug that was pointed out clearly and still made it through to release.