Microsoft Edge is Getting a More Responsive User Interface

The Microsoft Edge team used to talk up performance a lot, but today it’s highlighting a different type of performance, the responsiveness of the Edge user interface. And thanks to a new “markup-first” architecture called WebUI 2.0, Microsoft Edge is getting a lot more responsive, at least in Windows. (It’s not clear if these gains apply to Edge on Mac or Linux, but I would think so.)

“Edge is on a journey to make all user interactions in the browser blazing fast, starting with some of our newest features and core features,” the Microsoft Edge team writes in the announcement post. “Starting with Edge 122 [the current version is 125], the Browser Essentials UI is now much more responsive. The UI is now 42 percent faster for Edge users and a whopping 76 percent faster for those of you on a device without an SSD or with less than 8 GB RAM.”

Microsoft has made similar gains with the Favorites interface: Starting in Edge 124, Favorites is 40 percent faster. The team says it will make similar improvements to other key Edge experiences like Downloads, History, Wallet, and more over the coming months.

To achieve these improvements, the Microsoft Edge team is making the browser more modular, with more shared components in “common bundles” and a move away from JavaScript client-side rendering for the user interface. Thanks to updates in the web platform, the team decided it could use more modern web technologies to improve the responsiveness of the Edge user interface and make the browser faster.

The resulting effort is called WebUI 2.0. It’s described as a “markup-first” architecture that utilizes smaller bundles of code in a more modular way, using modern web components that are optimized for performance. Browser Essentials, a relatively new Edge feature, was converted to WebUI 2.0 first as a proof point, and with that success behind it, the team is off to the races.

“You can expect to see more features of the browser getting far more responsive over time,” the team notes. “We hope that more websites start moving in this direction of markup-first, small bundles, and less UI-rendering JavaScript code. Over time, we plan on making some of our packages open source so that all developers can benefit. Finally, as we continue improving WebUI 2.0, we’re committed to finding opportunities to improve the web platform itself even more.”