Microsoft Edge is a pretty snappy cross-platform browser with plenty of tricks up its sleeve to keep up with mainstream competitors and offer an even better user experience in some areas. Still, there is always some room for improvement, and Microsoft has just made some, resulting in a notable performance increase on macOS, namely on Macs with the M2 processor family.
The company published a post on the official Windows Blogs website detailing recent optimizations for Edge on Macs with Apple Silicon processors. Microsoft says it recently turned on profile-guided optimization, resulting in up to 20% better scores in key browser benchmarks, which should also result in perceived performance.
Here is the performance comparison in Speedometer 2.1, a test that measures a browser's responsiveness and overall website performance:
Here is MotionMark 1.2, a rendering performance benchmark for complex web pages full of graphics and animations:
And here is JetStream, a test for comparing how quickly different browsers start and run web code. JetStream can show you which browser is better at handling "heavy" websites.
Profile-guided optimization is not a new thing in the browser world. This compiler technique tracks the most commonly used functions and prioritizes them over other, less-used processes. As a result, users get more efficient resource use and better overall performance.
Google implemented profile-guided optimizations in Chrome on Windows almost eight years ago in version 53, which increased new tab page load time by up to 14.8%, page load time by up to 5.9%, and startup time by up to 16.8%. As for Microsoft Edge on Windows, Microsoft added profile-guided optimization in March 2020 with Edge 81, followed by link-time optimizations in Edge 83. You can learn more about it in a post on the official Windows Blog website.
Mac users can download Microsoft Edge for macOS from the official website.
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