This article lists some command-line flags I used to troubleshoot Edge/Chrome issues. I will keep updating this page as long as I support Microsoft Edge.

--user-data-dir

msedge.exe --user-data-dir=c:\temp\NewEdgeUser

This command-line flag overrides the User Data Directory, see User Data Directory for more details.

--do-not-de-elevate

Microsoft Edge will attempt to silently deelevate and relaunch itself when launched as an Administrator, running at Medium IL instead of High. If this feature is disabled (--do-not-de-elevate), Edge will show a warning to help users recognize the unexpected situation:

See Sandboxing vs. Elevated Browsing (As Administrator) for more details.

--winhttp-proxy-resolver

Instructs Edge/Chrome to use the system libraries for one narrow part of proxy resolution: evaluating a given PAC script or auto detecting WPAD.

--disable-features

RendererCodeIntegrity

msedge.exe --disable-features=RendererCodeIntegrity

Renderer code integrity is enabled by default, but in some case it may cause Edge to crash. There was a known issue where Symantec would cause Chrome and Edge to crash with error code: STATUS_INVALID_IMAGE_HASH, details can be found at: Google Chrome/Microsoft Edge Chromium version 78.0.x and 79.0.x error "Aw, Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this webpage." when using Endpoint Protection, disabling Renderer code integrity was a workaround. Edge also has a group policy setting to disable it: RendererCodeIntegrityEnabled

msDownloadsHub

msedge.exe --disable-features=msDownloadsHub

Above command disables the new download experience of Edge Chromium.

msEnhancedTrackingPreventionEnabled

msedge.exe --disable-features=msEnhancedTrackingPreventionEnabled

Edge uses a throttle to implement Tracking Prevention feature. Some compatibility issues like XHR race can be ruled out by disabling this feature. See ericlaw's post: Debugging Compatibility in Edge

--enable-logging

OneAuth log

msedge.exe --enable-logging -v=1 --oneauth-log-level=5 --oneauth-log-pii

For Edge identity issues, we can use this command-line to generate OneAuth log. Log will be saved as chrome_debug.log under User Data Directory.

Dual Engine log

msedge.exe --enable-logging --vmodule=*/dual_engine/*=1

For Edge dual engine (IE Mode) issues, we can use this command line to generate Dual Engline debug log. Log will be saved as chrome_debug.log under User Data Directory.

--trace-startup

SmartScreen trace

To automatically take a SmartScreen trace of Edge from startup launch Edge with the following command line arguments:

msedge.exe --trace-startup=SmartScreen --trace-startup-file=c:\temp\SmartScreenTrace.json --trace-startup-duration=86400 --trace-startup-record-mode=record-as-much-as-possible

--user-agent

A string used to override the default user agent with a custom one. We can use following command to let Edge send the same User-Agent string as Chrome to rule out some compatibility issue caused by different User-Agent header.

msedge.exe --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/97.0.4692.99 Safari/537.36"