Microsoft says its Edge browser feels even faster now

In a new post shared to its Windows blog, Microsoft says that it has “reached a major milestone” when it comes to improving the speed of Edge’s user interface. It now takes Microsoft’s browser less than 300 milliseconds to start rendering the first parts of its user interface, including text and images.

It’s a metric known as First Contentful Paint (FCP) that Google introduced in its Chrome browser in 2017, and according to Microsoft, “industry research shows that waiting longer than 300 to 400ms for the initial content can significantly impact user satisfaction.” However, while drawing the first elements of a feature or page in less than 300 milliseconds can help a browser feel responsive, FCP is not an indication of how long it will take a site to load in its entirety.

Last February, Microsoft said that Edge’s downloads, history, and creating new private browsing tabs were on average, about 40 percent faster. The company says it has since delivered similar performance improvements for 13 additional browser features, including settings that are more responsive, split screen that now provides “near-instant navigation and less loading delays,” and smoother playback for its AI-powered and accessibility-focused Read Aloud feature.

In the coming months, Microsoft plans to introduce additional performance improvements to Edge for features like Print Preview and Extensions.

Microsoft certainly hopes the upgrades could persuade some users to switch to Edge, which currently has less than five percent of the worldwide browser market share compared to Chrome’s 68 percent. Other than removing nags to use Edge for users in the EU, Microsoft may also soon face new competition from companies like OpenAI that are also considering introducing their own browsers to complement existing AI web search tools.

The improvements follow similar performance gains Microsoft has highlighted in previous blog posts, made possible by the company’s continued efforts to migrate Edge’s user interface to a faster WebUI 2.0 architecture that “minimizes the size of our code bundles, and the amount of JavaScript code that runs during the initialization of the UI.”

Correction, July 11th: An earlier version of this article misstated that the recent Microsoft Edge upgrades will reduce website loading times. The improvements apply to the “various feature UIs of Microsoft Edge.”