Microsoft draws flak for claiming Edge is 22% faster than Chrome

Microsoft’s Edge browser is far from the most popular Internet navigator available to Windows users, but if you ask Microsoft, internet users are missing out on a safe, speedy and battery sipping experience by using the now almost default Google Chrome browser.

Their claims were recently highlighted again by the addition of the above screen to the Microsoft Edge First Run Experience, which shows up when you start Edge after an OS update.

The site claims Edge is the fastest mainstream browser, with Chrome 22% slower and Firefox 16% slower.

This claim is not exactly consistent with the experience of Windows 10 users, and have now been examined in more detail by Tekrevue.com.

It turns out Microsoft’s claims are technically correct if you rely on the JetStream 1.1 browser Javascript benchmark, which dates to 2015.

When tested on the mode modern Speedometer 2.0 benchmark, which dates to January 2018, and which claims to be a more “real-world” browser benchmark, things look quite a bit different.

They tested the browsers on both high-end and mid-range PCs and on the latest versions of the browsers and OS.

On the high-end system, Edge was about 35 percent slower than Chrome and Opera, and about 22 percent slower than Firefox, while on the mid-range system,  Edge was nearly 40 percent slower than Chrome and Opera, while maintaining the same 22 percent deficit with Firefox.

Tekrevue concludes:

It should come as no surprise that Microsoft cherry-picked a browser benchmark that showed Edge in the best possible light next to its competitors. And in terms of the JetStream test, it seems that users at all ends of the hardware spectrum can expect good performance from Edge in terms of the specific JavaScript workloads that JetStream relies on.

But real-world usage might not be so rosy for Microsoft’s browser with its significant performance deficit in the Speedometer test, a test which prides itself on measuring the kinds of highly interactive online experiences that are increasingly common.

They note that there are other reasons to use Edge, such as Cortana integration, better text rendering, smooth scrolling and better battery life, but Microsoft’s speed supremacy claims are at best more complicated than they first appear.

Read the full details at Tekrevue’s tests here.

Via htnovo.net