Edge Stable 103.0.1264.37 breaks group policies (Chrome bug)

[German]I'm going to pull out an issue that may be of concern to administrators among of my blog readers. Since the release of Microsoft Edge Stable 103.0.1264.37, I got reports, that group policies no longer work. This night I came across more reports at Microsoft. So I'll briefly summarize the state of affairs here for your information. A fix is in the work (at Chromium and Edge developer teams).

Edge Stable 103.0.1264.37

Microsoft Edge Stable 103.0.1264.37 was released by Microsoft on June 23, 2022 (along with a 102 extended version) (see my blog post Microsoft Edge 102.0.1245.50 and 103.0.1264.37 (June 23, 2022)). It is a maintenance update that is supposed to fix two named security vulnerabilities, but introduces some minor new features (profile changes, etc.). 

Group policies broken

For Google Chrome or Chromium is known that there are problems with group policies since version 103. And I got similar reader feedback for my German blog post Microsoft Edge 102.0.1245.50 und 103.0.1264.37 (23. Juni 2022). Several comments reporting issues, some claim GPO issues. Blog reader Simon wrote (I've translated it):

We've been having GPO issues since 103 (103.0.1264.37) as well. Edge seems to forget them in the meantime (Homescreen, NewTab, Sync settings, …) and only reload or restart helps.

As a remedy, we have now rolled out Edge v102 Extended Stable via WSUS.

The night I stumbled on Twitter about the following  tweet from Steven Kister, which immediately rang a bell "there are similar comments on the blog". This is a user post in Microsoft's Query & Answers section.

Alexander P. describes as of June 28, 2022 in the Techcommunity section in the post Edge Stable 103.0.1264.37 breaks group Edge Stable 103.0.1264.37 breaks group policy management of the browser – Critical his observations.

Edge Stable 103.0.1264.37 breaks group policy management of the browser – Critical

Going from version 102.0.1245.44 (June 16) to 103.0.1264.37 (June 23), we started experiencing the following issue.

Our AD Domain Joined machines running Edge and being managed via Group Policy, unload their policy set on every gpupdate (foreground or background).

To reproduce this, just go to edge:\\policy and see your policies. Then, do a gpupdate and once it completes, visit that page again. It will show an empty set of policies (Although the policies are there in the registry). 

The only way to re-apply the policies is to:

1. Wait for the browser itself to do it (Reload Policy), could take any number of minutes

2. Click the Reload Policy button on Edge:\\policy

This results in all Externsions being re-installed, the centralized boomarks re-applied etc and it is both a problem raised by our end users because they see their extensions being re-installed on every gpupdate and we no longer are sure that our endpoint browsers are managed.

In follow up posts, AlexandrosAP points out that Edge 104.0.1293.5 in the Developers Channel also has the problem. Up to Edge version 102.0.1245.50 (Stable 64 bit) he can't detect the problems. In the Chromium bug tracker there is this entry describing the bug for Chromium 103.0.5060.53 (Edge is based on these builds after all). If I saw it correctly, the Chromium development team is in the process of ironing it out in the 104 development branch. According to Eric Lawrence (product manager at Microsoft) they are working on this bug with highest priority. There is no date for a fix yet.