How to enable Microsoft Defender Application Guard for Microsoft Edge on Windows 10?

Microsoft Defender Application Guard provides unprecedented protection against targeted threats using Microsoft's industry-leading Hyper-V virtualization technology. It helps to prevent any old and newly emerging attacks by using a hardware isolation approach.

Microsoft designed the Application Guard for Microsoft Edge. If you like to know how to enable the Microsoft Defender Application Guard on Windows 10, you will need to continue reading further.

What is Microsoft Defender Application Guard?

Before all other things, you would like to know what is Microsoft Defender Application Guard. It is a hardware isolation approach for Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 that provides unprecedented protection against targeted threats. It helps you to isolate enterprise-defined untrusted sites, protecting your company while your employees browse the Internet.

Application Guard has been created to target several types of systems including Enterprise desktops, Enterprise mobile laptops, Bring your own device (BYOD) mobile laptops, and Personal devices.

How to install the Microsoft Defender Application Guard?

In order to install the Microsoft Defender Application Guard, you will need a 64-bit Windows 10 computer with a minimum of 4 core logical processors, a Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) for CPU virtualization, and a minimum of 8GB RAM.

A point to note that Microsoft Defender Application Guard is not supported on VMs and VDI environments.

To install the Microsoft Defender Application Guard on a Windows 10 system, follow the steps as mentioned below:

1. Open the Windows Security app from the System Tray.
2. Navigate to the App & browser control | Isolated browsing section as shown in the following screenshot:
3. Click on the Install Microsoft Defender Application Guard link and accept the UAC popup.
4. In the Windows Features dialog, select the Microsoft Defender Application Guard and click OK:
5. This will start installing the Windows 10 optional feature. You may need to restart the system for the changes to take effect.

How to run Microsoft Edge with Microsoft Defender Application Guard enabled?

Once you have successfully installed the Microsoft Defender Application Guard, follow the steps mentioned below to start browsing the web in Microsoft Edge with the Application Guard enabled:

1. Open your Microsoft Edge browser.
2. Click the three dots (...) present at the top-right corner of the browser to open the "Settings and more" menu. Alternatively, you can press Alt + F keyboard shortcut.
3. As shown in the following screenshot, click the "New Application Guard Window" or press CTRL + Shift + A shortcut:
4. If this is the first time you are launching Microsoft Edge with Application Guard, it will launch the below window to complete the initialization.
5. Once the initialization is complete, it will launch Microsoft Edge with an extra layer of protection as described earlier.