Significant performance improvements with Edge 134
44 comments
·April 13, 2025raymondgh
franga2000
We aren't rooting for browser competition, but browser engine competition. Microsoft is clearly not interested in maintaining their own engine, so any users that switch to Edge are ultimately still giving market share and consequently power over the web standards to Google.
egeozcan
IMHO, 2.5 good engines are enough (webkit, blink, gecko - in the sense that webkit and blink are very similar). We just need more really good browsers which use gecko.
rafram
WebKit and Blink aren’t very similar. There’s only a small amount of WebKit code left in Blink, and their architectures are completely different now.
berkes
We certainly need more really good browsers which use gecko.
But for that to happen, Mozilla needs to up their effort to pull apart the components, decouple them from their own integration (firefox, thunderbird) and treat them as first-class projects, whose sole focus is to provide browser-builders and such with the components and tools to integrate the pieces.
Purely technical, it's still easier to build around "chrome" components. Which is why everything from electron, via "webviews" to the oculus browser or that webview-thing in your fridge, uses chrome tech and not mozilla. Edit: in an ideal world, it would be a no-brainer for e.g. Meta to pick Mozilla components to build a browser for their VR headset. Or for VW when they develop an in-car screen. Or for an app-builder to add some web-rendering of their in-app help.
But IMO this stems from a fundamental problem with Mozilla. Their cash-cow is firefox. So if they spend time and money making tech that then makes competing with firefox easier, they lose twice. So they will never truly commit to this.
Even if that would, IMO, be one of the most impactful things for Mozillas' manifesto of a "free internet".
coolgoose
And when they had EdgeHTML which wasn't even that bad, people pissed on it and said it's worse than Blink, idk man, this is an impossible case of getting the monopoly out of Google's hands.
refulgentis
I find it a very funny meme that Google controls web standards. Well I used to find it abstractly okay to worry about, then funny, and now annoying because it's used as a thought-terminating cliche.
Vinnl
It effectively decides how most people experience the web, and that doesn't change when people use Edge.
benterix
They do have an enormous amount of control over them, but the bigger issue is that standards are not that relevant given that all developers will test their stuff on Chrome and basically it (slower Firefox on Google sheets? Pause when opening YT documents? Who cares!).
It's not a cliche, it's sad reality. It doesn't have to be thought-terminating, though - some people try to do something about it.
solardev
Edge was never going to be that once Microsoft gave up on their own renderer. It's just Chrome with a Microsoft skin now.
On the other hand, it's exciting that Kagi is working on Orion. Ladybird will be interesting too. Maybe manifestv2 deprecation will start another browser war...
userbinator
It's just Chrome with a Microsoft skin now.
Microsoft could've made it look like IE and attracted a lot of that crowd with "same familiar UI, better rendering", but instead they decided to take the dumbed-down UI that Chrome had and add more MS-specific yet largely-useless or hostile features.
cadamsdotcom
Exciting - the article implies it came from a collection of improvements. Best of all they’re claiming the improvement is observed across platforms!
2 questions the article didn’t address:
1. What were the changes, and what was each one’s contribution to the total?
2. How much - if any - of this improvement be observed in other Chromium browsers?
smartmic
I checked what "Windows Blog / Microsoft Edge" is about. It says "Microsoft Edge news and product updates for developers focused on Microsoft Edge". If it was for end users, I'd have no problem with such superficial articles. But targeting developers - this is a shame and shows again and again Microsoft's culture around not supporting technically minded people (I don't even think of mentioning the term "hacker" in connection with Microsoft) with understanding what's going on under the hood. This is exactly the core promise of FOSS software and should be an eye-opener for not using proprietary software whenever possible (in this case, MS Edge).
close04
They made a chart where the the 28 bar is 40% of the size of the 32 bar. How to lie with charts. Their intended audience is made of IT news sites publishing filler.
Kamshak
Any perf improvement is great but the way they promote it seems a bit much?
1.7% faster navigation times 2% faster startup times 5% to 7% improvement in web page responsiveness
I'd say in practice a 2% faster startup time is probably barely noticeable?
jansan
It's is not noticeable at all.
Also, you would barely see the difference in the chart if they actually used a zero axis.
Here is a better (more honest) chart:
Edge 132 | 28.8 #############################
Edge 133 | 29.6 ##############################
Edge 134 | 32.7 #################################bni
One good thing the EU mandated recently is that you can uninstall Edge. On my gaming PC, I installed LibreWolf from the Microsoft store instead.
barrenko
Thank you so much for this tidbit, did it promptly.
hu3
That's great. They could do the same with Safari.
berkes
They should. But if they can is not that certain.
IANAL, but when I asked a person somewhat involved in EU anti-trust processes, osx and macos aren't even close to be classified as monopolies in most of the EU, so the idea that Apple is abusing their monopoly to enforce their own tech on users, doesn't apply that clearly.
bni
They did, on iPhone and iPad.
The way I understand it, the EU doesn't care about Mac at all since it has so low market share.
AshleysBrain
Wish they said what they actually did to get these improvements!
solardev
They could probably just load one fewer ad and postpone all the Copilot and Bing Rewards crap for a few seconds...
Sigh. Edge on Chromium was actually light and fast when it first came out, before Microsoft polled a Microsoft and enshittified it with all the unnecessary crapware.
est
Edge could easy win over Chrome if they support ManifestV2
cedws
cd chromium && git pull
qwertyhu66
The y-axis of the graph isn't even labelled
saretup
I’m assuming that’s the Speedometer score
HPsquared
It has a title and only one data series.
buccal
Graph with misleading y-axis does not give any credibility to Microsoft.
jupp0r
Aside: it’s impressive how the whole blog post does not mention a single detail of what they actually did to achieve these performance improvements. Code changes, really?
metaphor
Curious how the blog post published April 10 goes out of its way to highlight Speedometer 3.0...almost 2 weeks after 3.1 was released[1].
Dwedit
Microsoft Edge sends every URL you visit to Microsoft. Hard pass.
tonyhart7
is it true or just some analytical data?
Dwedit
It was true in 2023, but I haven't found any updates on the story since then.
It was sending a request to the domain "bingapis.com" with HTTP referer of the current page. Thus, sending your URL to Microsoft. It was a feature that could be turned off, but was on by default.
tonyhart7
how can this possible??? EU or DOJ should sue the fuck out of microsoft since its ON by default
aucisson_masque
> 1.7% faster navigation times
No one cares honestly, not even the hardest edge fan.
It would be more interesting to know how they improved edge performance.
snitch182
Interesting. Talking about it as if it was their achievement. Was it ?
I have this strange hypocritical mental model which simultaneously dismisses improvements to Edge as irrelevant while also wishing and rooting for more browser competition elsewhere.