Microsoft Touts Edge Performance Gains

It’s been a while since Microsoft has promoted the performance advantages of Edge, at least from a web rendering perspective. But today it’s doing just that.

“With every release of Microsoft Edge, we care about delivering better performance, so that you can spend less time waiting and more time browsing,” the Microsoft Edge team writes in a new post. “We’re very proud to say that, starting with version 134, Microsoft Edge is up to 9 percent faster as measured by the Speedometer 3.0 benchmark.”

To be clear, this isn’t the perceived performance advantages one will see thanks to the markup-first WebUI 2.0 work it began last year and has continued improving in recent months. Instead, Speedometer 3.0 is a web benchmark test that measures web app responsiveness, or what I think of as web rendering speed. And according to Microsoft, it’s seen big gains. Where Edge version 132 scored 28.8 on Speedometer 3, Edge 133 hit 29.6 and now Edge 134 scores 32.7 (on a PC with a 13th generation Intel Core processor, running Windows 11).

The Edge team claims further performance gains, noting that navigation time is 1.7 percent faster, startup time is 2 percent faster, and web page responsiveness is 5 to 7 percent faster than was the case with Edge 133.

“Our unique approach, and focus, on optimizing speed, and the code changes we continuously make to Edge, and to the Chromium rendering engine within it, have led to real-world performance improvements when using the browser on a variety of hardware running on Windows and macOS,” the team says.