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Browser Tests Show Edge Fastest, But Weak On Standards (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: The Internet and web browsers are an ever changing congruous mass of standards and design. Browser development is a delicate balance between features, security, compatibility and performance. However, although each browser has its own catchy name, some of them share a common web engine. Regardless, if you are in a business environment that's rolling out Windows 10, and the only browsers you have access to are Microsoft Edge or IE — go with Edge. It's the better browser of the two by far (security not withstanding). If you do have a choice, then there might better options to consider, depending on your use case. The performance differences between browsers currently are less significant than one might think. If you exclude IE, most browsers perform within 10-20% of each other, depending on the test. For web standards compliance like HTML5, Blink browsers (Chrome, Opera and Vivaldi) still have the upper-hand, even beating the rather vocal and former web-standards champion, Mozilla. Edge seems to trail all others in this area even though it's often the fastest in various tests.

5 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not in the PPA by NotInHere · · Score: 3, Informative

    Have you ran "sudo apt-get update"?

  2. Re:This is not news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Edge is not Trident. And a year or two ago, IE was beating Chrome in many standards tests.

  3. Re:Good, but man the fonts by cbhacking · · Score: 4, Informative

    Edge is shit for anything other than its dev tools or its rendering engine, though (and the latter still needs work, as TFA notes). No support for many of the things that any modern browser is expected to have, like:
      * No ad or tracking blocking (something IE has had, built in, since version 9)
      * No way to block Flash (built into IE in two different ways, ActiveX filter and site whitelisting for ActiveX), much less to block JavaScript
      * No extension support of any kind
      * Barely any cookie filtering (all, none, or no-third-party are the only options)
      * No "restore last session" (only possible if you set it to *always* restore the last session)
      * No RSS support
      * No useful context options (aside from Inspect Element) like "search this" or "translate this"
      * No user control over features like TLS versions image placeholders, etc.
      * No support for tab thumbnails (was in IE as "Quick Tabs" from v7 to v10, and on taskbar starting with Win7)
      * No tab grouping or ability to set Ctrl+Tab to switch in last-used order
      * ...

    It's an overgrown phone browser. It's not even close to suitable for PC usage.

    Now, with that said, you can get IE to run with Edge's engine (EdgeHtml), at least on Win10 Enterprise. That combo works pretty well. A few minor bugs, but you get the better rendering engine combined with the features of an actual PC web browser.

    --
    There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
  4. Re: Try Edge on the Insider Preview Build by Quantum+Jim · · Score: 3, Informative

    And Blink is based on Webkit, which is based on khtml. MS bought Spyglass Mosaic in 1995, twenty years ago. It had been in development longer by Microsoft by a factor of ten. It isn't Spyglass's baby anymore.

    --
    It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
    - Jerome Klapka Jerome
  5. HTML5Test is not a test of standardscompliance. by EMN13 · · Score: 3, Informative

    HTML5test is not a test of standards compliance; the title is misleading. It's a wishlist of features, some of which are standardized, but many of which are not (or are not part of HTML5). For example, html5test doesn't (in general) test whether you've really implemented a feature correctly (or really - at all) it just uses feature detection to check whether you've claimed to implement a feature. Fortunately, browsers are never buggy and this distinction doesn't matter.

    Then, html5test follows the whatwg's "living standard" instead of the less-cutting year-old actual standard html. This makes sense at first glance - we want to know which browsers support "new" features too! As a developer, that's great. As a score for a browser, that's questionable. Many features are added to the standard because one of the browsers initially experimented with a non-standard extension; lately that's been webkit/blink due to the mobile push, but previous names have included IE6. By *intent* the whatwg living spec is a few steps ahead of the browsers. What this means is that if you use this as a score is that you're going to penalize whoever is following the spec, and promote those leading the spec. That deserves at least a separate score.

    Then, there are HTML5 features that are deprecated, like . The continued support for scores chrome two points, and edge+firefox none. Is that really what you wanted to know? I bet there are *lots* of deprecated features in old IE; if you're going to start counting those...

    Then there's features like speech synthesis and recognition. Those aren't part of the spec, have never been part of the spec, yet they're worth 5 points together. Or worse, the Web SQL features, that have explicitly been rejected, also worth 5 points (only webkit-derived browsers support this).

    Almost all of the point differences between browsers can be explained by features that are experimental, deprecated or rejected.

    In short: don't use html5test. It's pointless.