Significant performance improvements with Edge 134
blogs.windows.com
blogs.windows.com
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...
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.
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.
The only thing which works on Edge but doesn't on Firefox is casting from YouTube to my TV, but since this ignores my adblocker I never use it anyway.
The comparison is done on the same physical machine, with the default Edge config (I don't use windows that often, so don't bother to change settings).
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".
edit: Probably misremembering, now that I searched for it. Yes "chrome" was (and still is?) used to describe the non-webview parts of the FF but apparently I totally made up the project part.
That was a project to make it easy to make site specific browser IIRC.
If Gecko would be as usable for integration as Blink is more people would use it overall which is a net benefit for Gecko.
Yet Firefox, the product, is what brings in money. Not the underlying tech.
I am not sure about the current state. But "back then" all the components in Firefox were tightly coupled and almost impossible to extract on their own.
"Back then" being, IIRC, 2012 or so, when I briefly worked on the web and CMS side of a project that used HTML + CSS (and a tiny bit of JS) to render the UI of a media-box. The OS was basically a thing that could boot a "browser" and handle network stuff. Firefox was not an option, as it was near impossible to even remove things like the address bar, tab handling and all that. But the hardware was so underpowered, that a full browser was not an option. Yet "yet another khtml" wrapped in the most basic "executable" did just fine.
But this is a while ago, and only one project that chose not to use Firefox/gecko.
If it doesn't even make sense for Microsoft when they have an entire, ubiquitous operating system to take advantage of, I don't see how we do anything except declare Google's engine the winner that takes all.
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?
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.
The way I understand it, the EU doesn't care about Mac at all since it has so low market share.
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?
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 #################################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.
How come there is still so much performance to gain and how come there is still so much NEED for it?
In the time CPU's and browsers got twice as fast together, it seems like web apps got twice as slow.
The only web app that people use a lot that has any justification to demand this is probably google maps 3D mode -but then again, we already had that webgl magic a DECADE ago as well.
Look at the most used websites. All of them are mostly text, images and sometimes (4k) video. All of this should be blazingly fast by now.
Another problem with Edge is intrusion into the web page. Curved corners for example. Every pixel in the page belongs to the application, and Edge is intruding. When you select text Edge shows its own menu, and you're confused as to whether the application is showing the menu or Edge.
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.
If you record a network packet capture, you will see it communicating with history.google.com. You might also notice that each time you load your browser history, that domain will be contacted to sync your history with Google's servers.
Much of your uploaded data can be seen from here, but you'll need to be logged in to see it: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?pli=1
I don't love Edge but at work I use it almost exclusively, because of the tighter integration with the Windows identity/authentication broker -- SSO flows are much less painful (read: effectively transparent) if your org uses AAD/EntraID as an IdP.
EDIT: I tested myself and it actually is ~4.8% faster than stock Chrome, using this benchmark anyway.
No one cares honestly, not even the hardest edge fan.
It would be more interesting to know how they improved edge performance.
MS seems unable or unwilling to make a decent browser. Edge can't be started until you click next through three screens where it tries to make you to create an account with them. The default homepage is full of ads on that website of theirs. I could go on and on, but seriously, I don't think anyone cares about Edge performance.