Microsoft Details How the New Edge Has Become More Efficient
- Paul Thurrott
- Sep 23, 2020
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Today, Microsoft explained the many improvements it’s made to the new Edge web browser since its initial release back in January.
“Performance is essential to your success, which makes it core to ours,” Microsoft’s Kim Denny writes. “To help ensure the browser doesn’t slow you down, we always keep performance in mind as we continue to improve Microsoft Edge. We’re always working to make Microsoft Edge faster and more efficient than ever before.”
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In Microsoft’s view, “performance” in the context of Edge relates to four key areas: Speed, responsiveness, resource usage, and size. And Edge has seen improvements in each of these areas throughout the year.
Speed. Microsoft shipped its Profile-Guided Optimizations (PGO) in Microsoft Edge 81 in March, followed by Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) in Microsoft Edge 83. Together, these changes contributed to a 13 percent browser speed improvement as measured by the Speedometer 2.0 benchmark.
Responsiveness. In April, Microsoft publicized the scrolling personality improvements it made to Edge and contributed to other Chromium-based browsers. “These improvements help Microsoft Edge feel smoother and more responsive to the mouse wheel, keyboard, or scrollbar scrolling,” Denny says.
Resource usage. If Chromium-based browsers have one major issue, it’s resource usage, and Microsoft is working to reduce the amount of memory and CPU that its browser needs. With Windows 10 version 2004, Edge now leverages Windows segment heap memory improvements to manage memory more efficiently and reduce overall memory usage. And the firm reports that Edge’s memory usage is down 27 percent as a result.
Size. Microsoft claims that it has shrunk the size of Edge on disk by half over the last year.