Microsoft: Windows 11 24H2 drops Defender Application Guard and browser extensions on Edge

Back in December last year, Microsoft announced the future end of support for Microsoft Defender Application Guard (MDAG), formerly called Windows Defender Application Guard, by Edge. A few months later, in April 2024, the tech giant added more details about it and related extensions, revealing that support was slated for June 2024.

This week, Microsoft finally officially confirmed that MDAG has been deprecated and removed in Windows 11 24H2, along with the related APIs for running isolated Windows applications. However, note that this does not affect home users per se, as this feature is primarily designed for businesses.

Microsoft’s official website provides a list of removed Windows features writes:

Microsoft Defender Application Guard, including the Windows Isolated Application Launch API, is no longer supported for Microsoft Edge for Business and is no longer available starting with Windows 11 version 24H2.

For those unfamiliar with how Application Guard works, using the Windows Isolated Application Launch API, Microsoft compares the visited URL against a list of trusted websites. If such a URL was not found in the list, Edge would run it in the secure, isolated environment of the virtual machine container.

In addition to the list of removed features, Microsoft also had updated removing WDAG from the deprecated list:

Microsoft believes that this feature is no longer needed for the latest version of Windows 11, as newer security features are already present in its browser that protect against phishing, bugs and data loss. Company writes:

Additional security features in Edge make it very secure without the need for Application Guard. The list of security features is growing:

In case you missed it, Microsoft did too removed WordPad in Windows 11 24H2.