Microsoft Edge Fails to Live Up to Its Own Speed Claims

Microsoft has been testing an idea to warn users that they're installing an inferior browser after downloading Chrome and Firefox. But how true are its claims that Edge is both 'safer' and 'faster'? TechRepublic put recent versions of the three browsers through a series of benchmarks, focusing on JavaScript performance.

JavaScript is at the heart of the modern web, with heavy pages loading tens of scripts that fetch even more JavaScript. If a browser struggles with this scripting language, it's likely to be slow overall.

The tests included Ares-6, which measures the performance of some of JavaScript's newest features, such as training simple machine-learning models in JavaScript.

However, these benchmarks have limitations when measuring real-world performance. For instance, Google's Octane 2.0 is no longer updated and should only be used as a general guide to speed.

In two out of three benchmarks, Edge lagged behind Chrome, but still managed to beat Firefox in two out of three. Subjectively, TechRepublic found that Edge's performance had improved significantly since its early days on Windows 10, when pages would freeze as they loaded.