Fix planned for edge downgrade issue in Windows 10 20H2

[German]A brief note to administrators with managed environments like WSUS. Microsoft's edge product manager has confirmed to me the edge downgrade issue when upgrading directly from older Windows 10 builds up to version 1909 to Windows 10 20H2. There should be a fix as soon as possible.

What is the Edge Downgrade issue?

Administrators rolling out the feature update for Windows 10 version 20H2 in managed environments must be careful. There are two ways to get to Windows 10 October 2020 Update (20H2).

• When upgrading from older Windows 10 versions, the multi-gigabyte feature update is rolled out via WSUS and installed on the clients.
• When upgrading from Windows 10 2004 to the 20H2, only a several hundred KByte Enablement Update is needed to unlock the features of the new Windows 10 20H2.

With the first mentioned variant of a complete upgrade, the old operating system is replaced by the new variant from the installation image. This results in a downgrade of the Edge-Browser from version 86.0 to the older version 84. The old Edge-Browser does not update automatically and cannot be updated. A manual reinstallation of the Edge 86 via MSI installer on affected clients must be performed.

I had published the problem after a hint from blog reader CJ in the article Windows 10 20H2-Upgrade: Microsoft Edge Downgrade as Pitfall here in the blog. Thre is also this post on German site administrator.de, which among other things confirms the issue.

Microsoft plans a fix

Andy Zeigler, Product Manager Edge, had posted this comment a while ago. He says: The update to Windows 10 20H2 should not downgrade Edge. But it can happen if the upgrade is done from a standard user account and the user ignores the request of the user account control. If the update was done with a 'system-level' installation, the Edge will update itself. MSI installation disables the native Edge updater, allowing a downgrade to happen. In a second comment from November 10, 2020 Andy Zeigler has written the following:

Hi All,

Thanks again for all of the detail — we have reproduced this issue locally and are working on a fix as quickly as we can. I'm really sorry for the inconvenience.

One thing that you can do is redeploy your version of Edge once the device is on 20H2 by adding a couple of extra arguments:

msiexec /i MicrosoftEdgeEnterpriseX64_85.68.msi REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=A

Also, the next time a new version is available (typically we publish Stable updates ~weekly), the next update will install suscessfully, e.g. if delivered via WSUS.

I recognize that this is not a great workaround for all scenarios — we are working on a solution to prevent the downgrade from occurring. I'll let you know as soon as the fix is available.

Thanks again,

Andy

So we should see a fix soon – thanks to Andy to keep us updated.

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