Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance | Hacker News Reader

Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance

anandtech.com

191 pointsdwgirvan135 comments

Benchmarks are good but the overall experience is what matters the most. I'm really impressed by the startup time of Edge. I type some query in the Cortana search bar and press Enter, it launches Edge extremely fast. So far I really love the performance.

However to make it my main browser I'm still waiting for adblocking extensions. I browse with a few tabs opened, one of them start randomly playing an ad video, at least it shows the sound icon on the tab so I know which one to kill.

I also noticed a few UI problems: When pressing the back button with "Ctrl" on, it does not open the last page in a new tab. Surprisingly, I use this feature very often on Chrome & Firefox. Sometimes when opening a new tab, the focus is not in the address/search bar, forcing me to click on it (or pressing Tab until I get it)

I don't have edge, but opening last closed tab can also be triggered via ctrl+shift+t. Perhaps they have that shortcut enabled?

He means opening the previous page history-wise in a new tab.

I didn't even realize that WAS a feature. Neat. I use Control-Shift-t VERY often, but never thought about this one.

You can also click the back button with the middle mouse button. I use it very often.

i always pressed back, middle clicked the link i had just clicked ... /facepalm

> I type some query in the Cortana search bar and press Enter, it launches Edge extremely fast.

Probably something to do with the fact that Edge/Cortana is already loaded at Windows start? So in a way it's a "trick" to starter "faster".

Cortana is, but the Edge process is not that I can find. but that's only part of the story. If the libraries utilized by Edge are already loaded by other processes, they benefit from being in memory already.

Still, I notice Edge launches faster than Chrome even when I have a separate "Chrome App" open (e.g.: Hangouts). But you have to remember that Chrome essentially re-implements the ChromeOS on top of Windows. Much like how iTunes performance degraded as Apple ported more and more of OS X to Windows just to get it to run, I think Chrome suffers from the same bloat on Windows.

I wanted to check though. How much of Chrome is already loaded when Windows starts? How much of Edge?

I used VMMap from Sysinternals. "DLLs" includes every library plus the executable. Non-system DLLs excludes anything I found loaded by another process on the system, which included all the standard Windows libraries. Unique DLLs excludes anything loaded by any other process, so at a minimum it's the process itself (see: Chrome.exe).

Chrome.exe run as a child and a parent share a handful of code.

EdgeCP.exe is the child to Edge.exe, and it shares about the same amount of stuff. The EdgeCP process is lean for Windows, the executable is only 300K.

Here's what I found.

    Process                    	DLLs (#)	DLL Size (MiB)	Non-System DLLs (#)	Non-System DLL Size (MiB)	Unique DLLs (#)	Unique DLL Size (MiB)
    Chrome.exe                 	179     	159           	3                  	31.3                     	1              	30.4
    Chrome.exe (child)         	54      	90.6          	4                  	41.3                     	2              	40.3
    MicrosoftEdge.exe          	131     	170           	5                  	15.2                     	3              	9.8
    MicrosoftEdgeCP.exe (child)	98      	154           	3                  	1.9                      	1              	0.3

The upshot: both Chrome and Edge use a huge list of system libraries. Chrome's application code is larger, but it's probably not just the fact that Edge has an advantage with much more of its code already loaded into memory.

The simple answer is probably that Edge starts faster because it doesn't have to run on top of a ported layer of ChromeOS, which adds many layers of abstraction. The Edge process seems to be a very lightweight shim over a rendering engine that works pretty well. I don't know how they'll make that work with extensions or sandboxing, but the size of the executable code and the way it looks reminds me of Servo. (Minimal UI code, stays out of the way of renderer and JS processes.)

Finally, I checked to see if Cortana loads many of the same DLLs as Edge. Yes it does. I don't think that's an optimization though, I think that's because Cortana might be using a WebView to display results. (That would help in porting it to iOS and Android, of course.) I haven't disassembled it or inspected its XAML, but I think I'm done messing with Windows 10 for the day.

Note that Servo proper isn't supposed to _have_ a UI (well, a browser chrome). It's an engine, Servo maps better to Trident or Gecko (rather than Firefox/Chrome/Edge). There are some experimental UIs for Servo though (which are also minimalistic, but that's because there hasn't been much work there yet)

Oops! You're right. I was thinking of servo-shell and the few other wrappers. They're very, thin shims around the renderer.

From what I understand, Cortana is built using a combination of Web technologies including Node.js, which makes it easily portable to iOS and Android.

Two things prevented me from making it my main browser:

1) It did lock up randomly. Not sure why. Seemed to happen often on many different sites. 2) The one or two pixel buffer on the left of the back button! (I should just use keybinds... but you know)

CTRL + L to highlight the address bar and gain focus. Thanks for the tip.

Alt + d also works, and I feel it's more convenient since it can be easily triggered using just the left hand.

This is a great example of why I prefer using alt or cmd with shortcuts rather than ctrl. I find altGr+L or cmd+L much more convinient than ctrl+L. Actually, I wouldn't use that shortcut nearly as often if I had to deal with the ctrl key. I hate that pinky stretch. So thanks for that alt+D tip, 'did not know of it ;)

I've remapped caps lock to ctrl, there's also the possibility to use the palm for ctrl not the pinky.

Alt+D sadly doesn't work in every language, Ctrl+L is independent of the UI language.

not on windows for some time, but i recall F4 also does that on all languages. i think ^L just focused the address bar, F4 focused the address bar and already opened the recently typed dropdown.

Don't you mean F6?

F6 focuses the address bar (or rather, different "panes" of the application in order; you can use it similarly in Explorer, for example). F4 indeed works in the way they described by focusing the address bar and opening the drop-down.

What I'd like to see are benchmarks that involve visiting some sample of sites out of the Alexa top 100 and performing standard tasks (reading Gmail, finding a certain thing on Amazon.com, etc.) I know that's dependent on things like network conditions, so you'd have to run it a lot of times to get meaningful results, but it'd still provide a more meaningful result than a lot of synthetic benchmarks.

I agree that major improvements are needed. SunSpider, Octane, and Kraken are all pure JavaScript benchmarks, very microbenchmarky (look at bitwise-and in the SunSpider suite). Oort Online is a benchmark of WebGL performance—WebGL is definitely worth benchmarking, but how common is it in people's daily browsing? HTML5Test tests whether a bunch of "HTML5" features are sorta present, not whether they actually work or anything—it encourages broken implementations that support just enough to pass the test.

The state of browser benchmarking is pretty bad. Right now the common suites of benchmarks overwhelmingly focus on what is easy to measure, not what reflects real-world perception of browser performance.

It feels to me like current benchmarks all measure execution time, not user time. Let's say you go from a reasonably sized web page to another, and then hit the back button. How long to load the previous page? Right click on a link and select open in new tab. How long does it take to open a new tab? It's definitely part of the user's perception of the browser's speed, but I don't think stuff like SunSpider and Octane even tries to measure it.

Heavily related to this, one key insight that I think has been neglected is that JavaScript benchmarks do a bad job of measuring cold code. Most code on the Web is cold, because much Web browsing consists of fresh page loads. Heavily optimizing JITs are exactly what you don't want for cold code: time spent compiling is time you could have been spending running the code. But benchmarks consist of running the same code repeatedly in a long-running loop, which encourages development of sophisticated, highly-optimizing JITs that spend a lot of time in up-front compilation, which end up being totally pointless for JS whose sole purpose is to run once to place an ad somewhere on the page.

It's easy to forget that JavaScript is still primarily a scripting language used to perform high-level application tasks. It's awesome that JS has gone so far low-level, and we should continue to push it as far as it can, but I think the bread and butter that users care about is not so much heavy number crunching but rather quick cold code that needs to run once or twice and get out of the way.

> Heavily optimizing JITs are exactly what you don't want for cold code: time spent compiling is time you could have been spending running the code.

I agree with your overall point of cold cold performance being paramount. But I don't think this follows. A heavily optimizing JIT can have very good cold-code performance if the JIT is especially fast and/or it makes especially good decisions about when to JIT.

The important trait is short break-even time: how long after JIT-ting some code that you break even on the investment of JITting time.

When all I knew was the JVM I assumed that JIT-compiling inherently had a long warm-up / break-even time. Now that I've experienced LuaJIT I know this isn't true. I haven't benchmarked the major JIT-ting JS engines but they seem pretty good at this too?

By "a heavily optimizing JIT" I mean "the specific mode of a larger JIT-enabled engine that compiles slowly but emits good code". So IonMonkey, Crankshaft, SpeculativeJIT/FTL are all JITs that live inside a larger engine that switches between them as needed. In JS land we usually call the individual modes "JITs" even though they may (or may not) share a bunch of code.

I don't know if it's a coincidence that around the time that paper was released Microsoft were considerably behind the curve in terms of js engine performance. The paper also misses the fact that excellent hot-code performance opens up new frontiers for the web like games, photo editing, and similar compute-intensive applications that are not well represented by their sample of popular sites since those are, by definition, limited by what was performant in extant browsers.

Well, yes and no. Pure JavaScript benchmarks (SunSpider, Octane, Kraken) are all more or less microbenchmarks, at least to the degree that they're testing only one specific kernel of an application (even if Octane and Kraken are justifable since they're pulling largish kernels from real code). A pure JS "cold" benchmark would be an even poorer microbenchmark, since it carries a large presumption that the cold JS is the bottleneck. In real JS code of the stuff you're talking about, you might be able to easily get measurable performance gains by, say, improving FFI between JS and DOM code, or improving the DOM code itself.

A better benchmark would be measuring page load times (or energy usage) or dynamic operations that included such cold JS code, since it would illustrate where performance improvements would be most beneficial.

Have you actually looked at some of these benchmarks? For example, Octane contains "Code loading", sunspider has "code decompression" (not true code loading, but at least it does de-minification).

Of course it's important, and all borwsers are developed with this in mind - but it's not possible to create reproducable test suite (with a score given) that will test actual sites - sites change

> I think the bread and butter that users care about is not so much heavy number crunching but rather quick cold code that needs to run once or twice and get out of the way.

I care about HTML and CSS with as little JavaScript as possible. The best code to optimize is the one isn't there in first place.

JSBench is a good benchmark measuring cold performance. I recommend everybody try running it.

It is known that Safari wins this benchmark, by a large margin.

Unfortunately the way it measures JS perf is questionable- it essentially records all operations during page load then replays them for the benchmark. This has the effect of unrolling all of the loops and disabling many of the optimizations that would have been applied to the original code.

Good point. I have a surface and want to use IE 11 more because its touch screen friendly, however the back button performance is slow sometimes. Can be very frustrating, so I typically use Chrome. Hopefully Edge fixes that.

I hate the HTML5Test (and alternative) sites with a passion for the exact reason you say.

HTML5Test lists iOS 8 as having IndexedDB support but it's so broken it's unusable on that platform. Even Mozilla completely disabled it in their LocalForage library due to it's issues.

LocalForage sounds like a startup for Portland millennials.

HTML5test is OK but caniuse.com shows more but people will complain about every browser test site since I started doing web dev 11 years ago.

Here's the thing. Edge is IE without the legacy baggage and that's all it is. No different. It's still behind every other browser in its ability to comply with standards and APIs. Despite Microsoft's claim that it will be an "evergreen" browser, that it will update more often, we have not seen this so the proof needs to be done.

I prefer caniuse.com too.

The bit about Edge just being IE without the legacy baggage is incorrect. You can see the new standards and APIs they've either added or are adding here: http://dev.modern.ie/platform/status/?filter=f06000000

The thing I'm happiest about is the user-agent change so poorly written JavaScript / CSS that was written for webkit instead of standards will now magically start working.

The new standards and API support are the same that would have been added to IE12. It doesn't matter that Edge came along.

I really suggest you look here: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Lars-Bak-and-Stev...

They do talk about the chicken and egg situation, where top sites will optimize for engines, then engines optimize for sites... i.e. it highly depends on the sites - of course all browsers test on top sites and optimize for them. But then the cycle repeats.

Running on a 7 year old HTPC with 2gb ram edge feels extremely smooth compared to chrome.

They should do benchmarks on lower end systems, such as atom based tablets.

I've also been fairly impressed with Edge on a low-spec machine. Realistically, once there is extension support and I can get an ad-blocker (ideally uBlock, and since it's rumored to be easy to port Chrome extensions I'm hopeful) I would have no issues using Edge as my daily browser.

I run exactly zero extension and used an ad-blocker for maybe 1 month in my whole lifetime.

With that being said, I am genuinely curious how these 2 things are necessary for you to consider a browser. Are there extensions that I don't have that is crazy for me not to have?

I'm genuinely curious how anyone can spend any significant amount of time reading on the web and not use an ad-blocker. Even mostly-benign animated sidebar ads are too distracting for me.

I don't mind static ads, and Click to Flash seems to take care off all the ads that would bother me. The sites I visit are pretty typical of HN, SO, etc... so I'm not necessarily running into bad site designs too often.

> Even mostly-benign animated sidebar ads are too distracting for me.

My ad-blocker has been honed for the past 20 years I've been using the web. It's in my head. I just don't see banner-shaped animated objects anymore.

That said, I do block Flash for performance reasons, which also results in getting rid of the worst offenders. The day banners start using CSS animations or god forbid WebGL, I'll probably start blocking them outright.

Not going to non-standard site ? I never ever go to site which its developer put ads every where he/she liked.

I have very restricted list of sites which I think are good enough my attention and time.

p.s. and I spend 7 8 hour a day sitting and reading material and documents from net.

p.s-2. And I am okey with standard ads.Site owners has right to make living to, and I think using ads-blocker is selfish act.

> Site owners has right to make living to

Site owners have the right to make a living. They do not have a right to waste my bandwidth, damage my hearing, or compromise my security.

> I think using ads-blocker is selfish act

Perhaps, but it's a reaction to the considerably more selfish trend in advertising.

"damage my hearing" indeed

Did you even read whole comment?

I did.

Two words: reading mode.

You can just modify your HOSTS file and get system-wide ad blocking.

My desperate need for adblockers fluctuates depending on the content I'm primarily browsing. I don't need adblockers for google, stackoverflow, and hackernews. I have gone for months without installing a blocker. But the first day my phone starts being buggy, and I have to start browsing Android press releases and forums, I install an adblocker, because those sites are literally infested with ads. My 60fps-on-skyrim-ultra-settings PC stumbles, lags, and kicks up all the fans to handle rendering some of these web pages because of all the ads.

This pretty much mirrors my experience. I'm using Edge on an ancient Thinkpad, and there are many days where I can use it with no issues at all. And then sometimes I click on a link to a news website and my computers grinds to a halt loading all the ads and autoplay videos.

Yeah... mainly an ad blocker. Ads not only compete for attention with the content I want to read on a page, they use my bandwidth and increase my attack surface.

The attack surface is actually a good point I had not thought of.

It's not just theoretical. If you want to infect users of well known web sites, buy ads on them. The major ad networks all say that they check for that but in reality they are very lax about what they run.

Primarily I use ad-blocking and Greasemonkey. There are, of course, tons of others but I generally haven't found any that fit my usage.

For me, ad-blocking is necessary from a privacy and security standpoint. It's also nice to speed up page loads, decrease memory/CPU usage, and make websites actually usable. I do tend to disable it on sites that I trust.

Why would I choose a browser that downloads things I don't want over one that provides the ability to not download those things?

This.

having just traveled overseas, i was shocked that nobody, and i mean nobody!, had a iphone 6 or macbook.

all i saw (in a middle to upper class setting) was moto E phones and asus and toshiba laptops. The better off people had Dells laptops and samsung phones.

Because MacBook is obviously better than all the systems you mentioned /s.

But that is true.

If you are actually using your laptop to something else than purely browsing the web, you can not go wrong with MacBook, but they are very expensive outside of U.S.

On the opposite side if you are just using your laptop to surf the web then either go with Chromebook or a tablet.

I used Chromebook for few years as my main development machine and while you can get most things working now when I switched to MacBook there is no competition between it and any other laptop I've ever seen. Worst thing about it is the Cmd/Windows and Alt keys being switched around.

No amount of speed matters until you have extensions. Without uBlock, it'll just be an ad filled mess.

That's not really true. I don't use ad blockers, but I still care about my browser speed.

I am curious why you do not, have you tried? Life is bliss.

Not OP but I develop websites and consult for companies on web matters.

I need to experience the web day to day the same way most other people do otherwise I have a rather distorted picture of things.

I don't mind paid advertising, but I dislike the tracking and profiling and sale of my information so for a while I was using Privacy Badger and other 'smart' ad-blocking anti-tracking plugins that learned.

As a web dev, it was blocking a lot of my CDN-hosted files to the point that I would need to work in other browser to make sure it wasn't really broken. Removing the ad-blockers restored normal function to me.

You may also want a website you a reading to stay in business and proffit from their work.

I think ad blocking days are numbered, the more mainstream it becomes the more likley the ad networks are to respond.

There are responsible ways to advertise which I completely agree with (that the adblocker I use respects) - and personally I do make an effort to turn it off for sites with a polite message and clearly need the revenue to function... however it gives me a warm feeling when getting caught out by linkbait articles that I am not feeding a fire I dislike.

How would ad networks respond to that? I can't think of any technically possible way for them to do that (except somehow getting operating systems to build in some crazy DRM scheme).

Sure there is, you start making the distinction between ads and regular content impossible. If all of the images on the site and all of the ads all map to something like www.sitename.com/resource/somekindofhash, then how would you tell programmatically whats an ad? You could even assign each visitor a mapping seed, so that caching still works. Blocking would have to be done on a user-by-user basis, turning this into a MAD-scenario, where some users just start blocking EVERYTHING that isn't textual or generated.

Simply serving the adds from the same domain as the content. Ad blockers are really simple currently.

After that I imagine the blockers could step it up and start looking for script names, or reporting on common scripts shared accross domains, by which point we are in an arms race :)

By making ads indistinguishable from content. Or serving content from ad servers.

I'm kind of opposed to the concept. If a web site is serving a page that is annoying to use, my solution is to not use it. I don't feel like doing usability improvements that should be done by the site operator.

You don't always have that option -- there will always be some crappy website out there that requires re-arranging your life to avoid (whether it be for a job, a bank loan, an apartment, the DMV, etc.).

For sites that are important to my life, I prefer not to have plugins modifying their contents in potentially intent-changing ways. Ad-blockers make no guarantee to preserve functionality.

As great as Edge is in the benchmarks, the engine beneath seems to be solid, the browser is shipping in a half-completed state. The lack of support for extensions I think is going to do more harm than good. I don't get the rush to release Edge, wouldn't it have been better for Microsoft to just hold off a couple of more months until the browser was ready feature wise?

I haven't been using the Windows 10 development builds, so I have yet to use Edge. As a front-end developer, I am excited we are getting a browser that seemingly supports all of the essentials (and prefixless too).

My guess is, they figure that most non-tech people will continue using IE 11 if Edge was not shipped with Windows 10 rather than moving to Edge when Edge shipped.

Probably they figure oem's would load up edge with malware extensions, and this way they can't. No extensions is still a better experience than the typical set of extensions on a cheap laptop.

I'm excited to try out Edge, from what I've read it looks like a great browser but the key feature in Chrome that keeps me from switching is the shared history. I use Chrome on my Android phone and tablet, and on my desktop and laptop so all of my browsing history and currently open tabs can be accessed from any device. I rely on this day-to-day, particularly the "Recent Tabs" option from other devices.

Until another browser implements that (and supports Android phone / tablets), or I can find a third-party service that seamlessly offers the same options, I can't see myself switching from Chrome any time soon.

I agree that "recent tabs from other devices" is very handy. IE11 does have that, so I guess Edge will too (at least eventually). This doesn't help you since you probably don't want to trade your Android phone/tablet for Windows phones/tablets.

If you insist on Android devices, Firefox also has the "recent tabs from other devices" feature. The feature is so useful it made me switch from Chrome to Firefox in fact: I used to use Chrome on my laptop and when I bought an Android tablet I used Chrome on it to share tabs between devices, but then Android Chrome introduced some change that made MathJax render incorrectly, so I switched to Android Firefox on the tablet; this in turn made me switch to Firefox on my laptop, to be able to share tabs again.

I wonder how much the Edge's performance will affect the average person's decision to use it or not. Browsers one up each other all the time and I'm sure Google's next major Chrome update will show improvements over the Edge.

Renaming your browser won't change peoples' memory of Internet Explorer, even if Microsoft built Edge from the ground up. The average person is still going to be thinking IE when they see it.

Without extensions, I personally am not leaving Chrome - even if it's a resource hog. But it is nice to see how Microsoft is changing their behavior. Competition between products is always a good thing.

IE is usually very competitive at each release... the problem is they tend to sit at 2+ years between releases, and even with IE10 and 11, it hasn't gotten much narrower.

The real test will be to see if IE can keep the pace set by chrome and firefox.

IE has been discontinued so won't keep pace with Chrome or Firefox. IE 11 is the last version ever.

Edge has replaced IE. Edge is set to receive continuous updates the same way Chrome/Firefox do today. It is not pinned to Windows or Service Pack releases like IE was historically.

I don't care if it's Trident, Edge, IE, whatever you want to call it... "The browser formerly known as Internet Explorer." has a history of infrequent releases.

If with the "Edge" release this changes, then I'll accept that... MS said when they released IE10 that they were planning on more frequent releases... that hasn't happened.

IE11 has been doing automatic updates for at least a couple years now, by default.

Has IE11 added new features since release, or has it only been security/bugfixes?

IE11 on Windows 8/8.1 got updated with EME and MSE for Netflix HTML5 video. Also new F12 devtools.

IE11 on Windows 7 is sadly not getting any new features, only updated with bug fixes and security updates.

So, for most of the users of Windows, no real IE11 updates for about two years now... I think my point really stands... most feature development is on IEvNext/Edge/Spartan ... When MS releases a browser with broad, rolling updates with significant new features keeping up with other browsers in a release cycle that isn't two years apart, I'll believe it when I see it...

So far, it really hasn't been the case since before IE6 came out.

To be honest, IE11 has been dealing with the web as well as the other major browsers since there haven't been any major new browser standards in the last two years. Maybe WebRTC, but no one is making a commercial service out of that yet.

With Windows 10 deploying en masse, IE11 is already in sunsetting mode. Windows 10 and Edge is on rolling updates so they are getting new features more frequently. Service Release 1 is out next month and Threshold 2 features update is out by year end.

> It is not pinned to Windows or Service Pack releases like IE was historically

and chrome was on android pre 4.2. though it was called "stock browser" then.

That's fair, but it really wasn't Google preventing newer android releases for handset manufacturers, or the carriers. It's also the main reason the browser was separated out, so that it could be updated separately.

>Renaming your browser won't change peoples' memory of Internet Explorer, even if Microsoft built Edge from the ground up. The average person is still going to be thinking IE when they see it.

Maybe I'm underestimating how culturally aware the average person is, but I doubt most people will care to make this connection between IE and Edge.

How could they not?

You upgrade your OS or buy a new computer, and you see a new application ( that you didn't install ) and you ( presumably ) can't uninstall it. Wouldn't any rational person assume it's a pre-installed application? Wouldn't it make sense to believe that the OS developer created it?

There's an old joke about IE when people purchase a new computer: It's the browser I use to install another browser. What are people going to think when they don't see IE anymore and they see a new browser?

Everyone will know the Edge is Microsoft's new browser, and everyone knows that Microsoft's previous browser was IE.

> Everyone

In my experience, you're dramatically overestimating how many people really understand what a browser is, what IE is, or can disambiguate between Chrome and Google.

Here's a great video that Google did back in 2009 that illustrates this pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ

"Everyone" wasn't the literal everyone, "everyone" is the group of people that buy a Windows OS and install another browser. Those people know what a browser is.

Maybe I misunderstood, but I was replying to your overall message about:

> I wonder how much the Edge's performance will affect the average person's decision to use it or not.

About half of people using Windows continue using IE right now. So, "everyone" and "average" definitely refer to a lot of people who have absolutely no idea what any of us are talking about in this entire page of comments. It's so easy to underestimate how little truly "average" folks understand or care about these nuances in the real world outside of a few tech bubble areas.

I have an excellent example of this. Despite having both Chrome and Firefox installed on my home desktop computer, my wife continues to use IE 11. Even with her own profile for Chrome, and using an Android phone with Chrome, she still sticks with IE for some odd reason.

Maybe you're right, but I feel like if there's one thing that will tip them off, it's the graphical similarity of the icons, rather than all the OS connections you've described.

I think with the name change, people might actually think of trying it out.

The reason the browser is named "Edge" is so the icon can remain very close to the Explorer "E". The average person is going to make that connection which was entirely the point.

"I'm sure Google's next major Chrome update will show improvements over the Edge"

What makes you so confident the next one will be faster if the current one is slower? Are you on the dev team?

Extensions are coming later this year. Supposedly it will be able to run Chrome extensions.

To be clear: Microsoft did NOT build Edge from the ground up. Edge is IE without legacy code; that is all.

Really?

I thought they wrote a new rending engine and some other key features?

The Spartan rendering engine (edgehtml.dll) is a new component and separate from Trident (mshtml.dll). The new engine began as a fork of Trident, but has since diverged rapidly over the past many months, similar to how several other browser engines have started as forks prior to diverging. The new rendering engine is also being built with a very different set of principles than Trident - for example: a focus on interoperability and the removal of document modes. - MS statement

I think the most interesting feature is the ask cortana feature, http://www.thewindowsclub.com/enable-cortana-in-edge-browser, it performs reasonably well on most queries and is pretty fast. Especially useful when reading articles where you have no clue about some of the people mentioned or phrases and expressions being thrown around.. Highlight the phrase and hit the ask cortana option in the menu.

So funny, what's old is new again. I remember Encarta Factfinder back in the day did something similar. Of course, it didn't have any NLP, but the core of the idea is there.

http://www.activewin.com/reviews/software/apps/ms/encarta/20...

These benchmark articles frustrate me because I rarely feel they tell me anything. What do the benchmarks actually measure? When one tested product benchmarks as better/worse than another, what specifically is happening to make it better or worse? I feel like a good technical reporter ought to be able to dig deeper, do some investigation and provide real insight.

Edge is not ready for prime time. I have a desktop app that does the OAuth dance redirecting to localhost. Edge didn't respond correctly, whereas Firefox, Chrome and even IE handle it OK. Even if I make IE the default browser, control is still handed over to Edge.

I started using Chrome because it is fast in startup, load. But its not the case anymore. Still I am using Chrome coz of awesome developer tools and Chrome extensions.

Are they really going the completely disregard Linux users?

Why would you expect that they wouldn't?

Cause a) recently they've been showing more interest in developing for different platforms (OneNote, Visual Studio Code); b) the other major browsers have a Linux release; c) IE had a release for Linux at some point; and d) there is a market of people that might use their product.

They had a version for Unix. It probably ran on Linux through a compatibility layer but it was not designed for any Linux distro.

And that was a long time ago when they were competing with Netscape. It was easy for them to do that because the original IE was mostly a branded version of Spyglass's Mosaic which was designed from the beginning to run on Unix and Windows.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.

Not easy in my opinion, IE is a hard user of Windows APIs.

Are Linux users going to completely disregard Microsoft?

Over the last few years a lot of people have taken themselves out of the Microsoft 'eco-system' by getting an Apple PC or by installing a flavour of Linux on their once-Windows PC. There are also many users who 'use' Windows PC's (because there is one on their desk) but no longer care for how Windows works, if they can read their email, open documents and search the internets then why bother involving oneself in any 'computing'?

With this audience I cannot anyone getting zealously excited because Microsoft has a new browser. Nobody is going to switch to Windows from whatever they have migrated to - which can also be Android or ChromeOS. It will be like Windows Phone, sometimes some people might use it but that won't be what most people will do. Why go to the effort?

We are lucky that there have always been browsers that do operate on different operating systems, e.g. the original Netscape, Firefox and Chrome. I am so glad I can move between Windows PC, Chromebook, linux PC and Android phone to have the same browsing bookmarks/experience/history everywhere I am. I wouldn't get this with Windows/Edge.

Apparently, yes. What, did you think that they actually meant "Microsoft loves Linux"? No, they're supporting Linux in the server business because that's the only way they can seriously take hold of it. Embrace it, if you will.

This is all I need to switch:

1. Actually work (strangely, current IE can't accomplish this on some of my machines)

2. Tree Style Tabs

3. Support for popular ad-blockers

4. Easy on memory (including ability to unload a tab and actually release that memory, something FF can't seem to figure out)

5. Don't constantly take a 45 second timeout with lots of tabs open (like Firefox)

Something about the icons used in Edge feel unfamiliar to me. The back, forward, and refresh arrows even feel alien. I think they have deviated away from recognizable icons for the rest of the toolbar too. Something just doesn't feel right

What matters is HTML5 compatibility which is lacking.

If Edge is not on approximate feature parity with Chrome (it isn't), then the benchmark is meaningless.

This depends entirely on what you want your browser to do.

I personally use my browser to, well... browse the internet?

I'm worried about a few things:

Where will Edge take us? Is Edge replacing IE, or is it parallel?

I feel like this is going to cause confusion. Why did they choose a modern evolution of the Internet Explorer logo (Blue "e" with an orbit)? Everyone is going to expect that this is the new Internet Explorer. ActiveX plugins don't work - are you using Internet Explorer? "Yes! The blue e!" Eek.

If IE is going to co-exist alongside Edge, I feel that we will just be forced to support another new browser.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

Edge is replacing IE and is the default browser for Windows 10. IE is included in Windows 10, but it is buried in the Windows Accessories folder in the Start menu. The current version of IE is 11 and that will be the last. Microsoft will support IE until Jan 2016.

> Microsoft will support IE until Jan 2016.

Uh... [1]

    Beginning January 12, 2016, the following operating systems
    and browser version combinations will be supported:
    
    Windows Vista SP2         Internet Explorer 9
    Windows Server 2008 SP2   Internet Explorer 9
    ...

    After January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of Internet
    Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive
    technical support and security updates.

They go on to talk about how Windows 7's Enterprise Mode will be supported until 2020 so you can still keep IE kicking around well beyond 2016.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/07/stay-up-to-dat...

Ah, you are correct. I mixed up the dates with IE 10 for some reason.

Still can't calculate height or fire mouseLeave events correctly.

That's hard to believe. Can you give us an example? Also mouseleave is an event IE invented and is non standard. How would it not work on IE?

Microsoft are coming out swinging at Google with their latest browser and Operating System. Their Cortana search feature is impressive, and very well integrated.

Even Windows 10 isn't shying away with a search field located in the main task bar. These features are there to try and chip away at Google's search dominance.

It will be interesting to see if it works. If Microsoft makes a browser people want to use, Chrome will be in trouble. Chrome might end up like Google Maps on iOS.

While many seem to be welcoming a 'new Microsoft' with their open source efforts, it seems they still don't shy away from trying to kill off competitors by leveraging their Operating System monopoly.

Why wouldn't you do it?

I definitely will be one of who which will switch from chrome to edge(or any other viable competitor) very soon. The ridiculous path chrome team have chosen for their path is enough for me already.I have said this so many times, I don't want another OS on top of my OS.I just want a Browser , not an application-platform which uses my 3 GB of ram for apps and extension.Even when I delete all app and extension there is certain amount of overhead.

Chrome team can offer two distinct version , lightweight without extension and app support and super fast start time , and complete version.

Chrome turned to new JVM recently.just instead of java you developer should use Javascript.

I know this is google policy to push people to net (because it means more profit for google) but I don't want some company dictate what should I do. and at least with edge I have super fast load time and lightweight browser.

Yep, same reason I'm gonna switch to IE

Benchmarks are largely useless, everyone makes up their own and none of them translate into how it FEELS to use a browser IMHO. Great they made some stride but so did every other browser also they don't have extensions yet and won't at launch which is a nonstarter.

I used it VERY briefly in a WIn 10 VM (not to use it, just to go download some tools) and wanted to pull my hair out. Little things here and there that were a constant reminder that microsoft just is bad at browsers. Sure they can piece together something that can access the web but it's not an enjoyable experience. I had to go and download chrome because apparently browsing around online, having multiple tabs open, and downloading files was a little too much for Edge to handle. I'd say it was the number of ads on the sites I was going to but I went to the same sites in Chrome without an adblocker (Vanilla Chrome) and it handled it without a sweat. This is by no means a complete test but I really wanted to try Edge and it felt like it was actively working against me and unable to deal with websites that I might have to go to from time to time that are covered in ads.

We will see what Win 10 ships with and what Edge looks like after extension support is added but I'm not holding my breath for the IE/Edge team to put out anything beginning to look like a real browser. Lastly no cross platform support? Fuck off, don't expect me to test for it at all. And no, VM's are not acceptable for testing. Don't misunderstand me Apple sucks with Safari and their lack of browser choice (and engines) on iOS almost as much but at least webkit is sane. Not to mention you can test webkit on Windows but I do agree it's not the same as Safari. That said Safari is a LOT closer to FF/Chrome than IE/Edge is to FF/Chrome which reduces needed testing substantially.

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