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Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance

anandtech.com

31–40 of 138 posts

Re: Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance

#31
post #19

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.

Re: Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance

#32
post #21
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance

#33
post #32
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance

#34
post #23
post #6

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. Wi…

>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.

Re: Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance

#35
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance

#36
post #24
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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…

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.

Re: Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance

#38
post #34
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. W…

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.

Re: Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance

#39
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance

#40
post #16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
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