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February 13, 2020
PC

New optimizations boost performance in preview builds of Microsoft Edge

Starting with Microsoft Edge build 81.0.389.0 on 64-bit Windows 10, we’ve enabled new toolchain optimizations that should provide a substantial performance improvement in general browsing workloads.

We’ve measured an up to 13% performance improvement in the Speedometer 2.0 benchmark when compared to Microsoft Edge 79. Speedometer measures performance by simulating user interactions in a sample web app across a number of DOM APIs and popular JavaScript frameworks used by top sites, and is generally regarded as a good proxy for real-world performance across a number of different subsystems including the DOM, JavaScript engine, layout, and more.

We’d like your help validating these improvements in your real-world browsing as we approach our next Beta release later this month. You can try out these improvements by comparing performance in the latest Dev or Canary builds to Microsoft Edge 80 or earlier.

The details:

We measured Speedometer 2.0 in ten consecutive runs on Microsoft Edge 79, where the optimizations are not yet implemented.  The results are below.

Microsoft Edge
v. 79.0.309.71
1 84.6
2 85.4
3 85.3
4 85.3
5 84.6
6 84.9
7 85.8
8 84.7
9 84.8
10 84.3
Median 84.85

Benchmarked on Windows 10 1909 (OS Build 18363.592) on a Microsoft Surface Pro 5 (Intel(R) i5-8250U CPU 1.60GHz and 8 GB RAM), with no other applications running and no additional browser tabs open.

We then ran Speedometer 2.0 on recent versions of Microsoft Edge 81 which include the new optimizations, with the following results.

Microsoft Edge
v. 81.0.410.0
Microsoft Edge
v. 81.0.403.1
1 96.3 96.7
2 91.1 95.7
3 91.7 95.2
4 96 95.5
5 97.6 95.5
6 97.4 95.9
7 96.8 96.2
8 94.4 96.2
9 96.4 95.5
10 94.4 95.4
Median 96.15 95.6

Benchmarked on Windows 10 1909 (OS Build 18363.592) on a Microsoft Surface Pro 5 (Intel(R) i5-8250U CPU 1.60GHz and 8 GB RAM), with no other applications running and no additional browser tabs open.

We would love for you to try the new optimizations in Dev or Canary and let us know if you notice these improvements in  your real-world experience. Please join us on the Microsoft Edge Insider forums or Twitter to discuss your experience and let us know what you think! We hope you enjoy the changes and look forward to your feedback!

Update as of 02/20/2020 – Thank you to the Microsoft Edge Insider Community for continuing to test and provide feedback on Microsoft Edge. Your testing and feedback helped us identify a compatibility issue with a third party app that we’re actively working to address. We’ve modified the optimizations to mitigate the issue and expect you’ll see more modest performance improvements in the upcoming Beta Channel build. Please continue hammering on the Canary and Dev builds and sending us feedback!