Quicker Than Ever: The New, Rapid Microsoft Edge Experience

Quicker Than Ever: The New, Rapid Microsoft Edge Experience

Microsoft Edge is getting new features all the time, but many of them aren’t all that useful. Thankfully, the latest improvement will make just about everyone happy: faster performance.

Microsoft is rewriting many of the interface elements in the Edge web browser to load faster and be more responsive, as part of its “WebUI 2.0” internal project. The Browser Essentials panel was the first component to be reworked, and Microsoft reports that it’s “now 42% faster for Edge users and a whopping 76% faster for those of you on a device without an SSD or with less than 8GB RAM.”

Even though Microsoft Edge is a native desktop application, elements like the New Tab page, settings pages, side panels, and other browser interfaces are essentially embedded web pages. Those embedded views have the same problem as many regular websites and web apps—it can take a while for important buttons and menus to fully load. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and most other web browsers also have a mix of native and web-based interfaces (Firefox’s entire interface is styled with CSS ).

Microsoft is now working on updating the Favorites panel, which should be around “40% faster,” and other components will be reworked over the coming months.

Microsoft said in a blog post, “In this project, we built an entirely new markup-first architecture that minimizes the size of our bundles of code, and the amount of JavaScript code that runs during the initialization path of the UI. This new internal UI architecture is more modular, and we now rely on a repository of web components that are tuned for performance on modern web engines.”

It’s great to see Edge become a bit faster and more responsive, but removing all the unrelated garbage that has piled up over the years (like games in the sidebar and predatory BNPL loans ) would also help performance and usability. That probably won’t happen, though, so try to enjoy the snappier interface. You could also try switching to Firefox , which beats Chrome and Edge in some performance benchmarks and has a lot less feature bloat.

Source: Microsoft Edge Blog