Which One’s Faster: Microsoft Edge, Firefox Or Chrome?

Web browsers will always find a battlefield to fight on — Javascript performance, memory usage, variety of extensions and so on. With Microsoft Edge soon to be a serious option, it’s about time we had a look at how it matches up to the competition.

This post was originally published on Gizmodo Australia.

While it’ll be a while before we have a comprehensive understanding of how Microsoft’s Internet Explorer replacement stacks up, we are in a position to test its general performance. There are plenty of online sites designed to measure browser speed and responsiveness, including the Javascript-focused JetStream, SunSpider and Google Octane.

Along with these three, gHacks’ Martin Brinkmann used Mozilla Kraken, PeaceKeeper and WebXPRT to put Edge up against Chrome, Firefox, Opera and even Vivaldi. How did it fare?

Most results are fairly close when you compare them but there are a couple of exceptions:

1. Microsoft Edge dominates the Apple JetStream and SunSpider benchmark.
2. Edge’s PeaceKeeper performance was weak by a large percentage.
3. Pale Moon performed considerably worse than other browsers in most — but not all — benchmarks.

Canary (the development build of Chrome) and Firefox’s stable branch put up the best fight, each winning two tests (from a possible six). The short story is the Edge was competitive so you shouldn’t feel discouraged from giving it a try once Windows 10 hits on the basis of Javascript performance. If you want to check out the raw numbers, a table is available in Brinkmann’s article.

As for its other features? We’ll have to wait and see.

[gHacks]


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