Microsoft details new JavaScript performance updates in Microsoft Edge
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When Microsoft introduced its Edge browser, the company talked a lot about the browser’s performance. Over the coming months, the company updated Microsoft Edge with a tonne of performance improvements, making Edge a lot faster, and more efficient. With the upcoming Anniversary Update for Microsoft Edge, Microsoft is improving JavaScript performance in Microsoft Edge for Windows 10 users.
Firstly, the company is changing how event-handlers work for websites in Edge. Currently, a lot of browsers load the JavaScript for event handlers on webpages which are pretty useless unless a specific event handler is actually used. To address this issue, Microsoft Edge is going to will delay the full parsing of event handlers, allowing web pages to load slightly faster.
Additionally, Microsoft is also making changes to how JS functions are handled in web pages by Microsoft Edge to improve performance. These improvements will be able to “shrink a fair amount of memory footprint” for each web page. According to the company’s experiments, these optimizations can decrease memory usage per web page by 4-10% which is pretty good.
Microsoft also showed off Edge’s performance against Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox after the latest performance improvements today. Once again, Microsoft Edge continues to obliterate Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox when it comes to JavaScript performance:
Of course, these improvements are available on the Chakra engine alongside Microsoft Edge, which the company open-sourced a few months ago.
These improvements will be coming to the public with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which is expected to arrive sometime next month. Alongside JavaScript performance improvements, Microsoft is also adding a bunch of new features such as Extensions support to Edge with the Anniversary Update. It is worth noting that if you are a Windows Insider, you can already experience some of these improvements in the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview builds.
