San Francisco: In a new post on the Microsoft Edge blog, Kim Denny, the browser’s chief PM director, outlined how the company has made it faster and more efficient in the past few months. In order to help users perform tasks as quickly as possible, the team launched the profile optimization (PGO) in the stable channel of Edge 81 and the link time optimization (LTO) in the Edge 83 in March.
PGO prioritizes the most important parts of the code, while LTO optimizes memory usage. According to the Speedometer 2.0 benchmark, these two technologies clearly increase Edge’s speed by 13% compared to the previous version. Microsoft has also improved the scrolling animation of the browser and enhanced the overall look, feel and response to touch of scrolling in April. Denny says these changes make Edge feel smoother and respond faster.
The Edge team also continues to work to reduce the memory and CPU power required by the browser. For example, according to internal testing by the technology giant, the May 10th, 2020 update of Windows can reduce the memory usage of the browser by as much as 27%. Finally, Microsoft has reduced the size of Edge by half in the past year, so as not to take up too much device storage space.
According to statistics from NetMarketshare, Microsoft’s Edge browser has recently replaced Firefox as the most popular alternative to Chrome. Chrome still has the largest market share, more than 70% of the market share, and Firefox is not lagging behind, but Microsoft’s competitors have been slowly popularizing.
