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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.

18 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Fast but weak on standards eh? by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Insightful

    By that metric, I'll go you one better: Links. Very, VERY fast, but very shit on standard (by design).

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:Fast but weak on standards eh? by bmo · · Score: 3, Funny

      Real programmers use butterflies.../xkcd

      Realer programmers make apple pies from scratch. /sagan

      --
      BMO

  2. Not in the PPA by KGIII · · Score: 4, Funny

    sudo apt-cache search edge

    Too many listings - nothing interesting.

    sudo apt-cache search edge-browser

    Nothing...

    Try as I might, it doesn't seem to work. I guess, by default, that makes it the fastest browser, no?

    --
    "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    1. Re:Not in the PPA by NotInHere · · Score: 3, Informative

      Have you ran "sudo apt-get update"?

  3. Benchmarks... by pushing-robot · · Score: 2

    The fact that IE11 and Edge run SunSpider—and just SunSpider—so fast is rather suspicious... Feels like they optimized the engine for those specific routines until they could claim 'Twice as fast as other browsers!'

    --
    How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
    1. Re:Benchmarks... by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 2

      Edge, the Volkswagen of browsers!

  4. What did you expect .. by nickweller · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Microsoft Edge browser runs fastest on Microsoft Windows. Metrics such as memory commit are meaningless as most of Edge gets loaded at boot and such processes aren't counted. What are the results on other desktop operating systems. You know the computing ecosystem that exists outside the Microsoft universe. Brand new browser same ole MICROS~1 shuffle.

  5. Cross-platform by aaaaaaargh! · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The only browser I would ever use is cross platform. Like any other software I use, including programming languages. Anything else would be impractical and is too 90s.

    1. Re:Cross-platform by supremebob · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah... one of the reasons I like Chrome so much is that my bookmarks are updated automatically on my Windows Desktop PC, Mac Laptop, Android Tablet, and iPhone. I doubt that I'll be able to pull off that stunt with Edge for awhile.

    2. Re:Cross-platform by xenoc_1 · · Score: 2

      Are they stored on Google servers in an encrypted form that Google can't read or are you being data mined by Google?

      If you set your own passphrase, then your Chrome bookmarks (and history and settings and if you sync them too, passwords) indeed are stored on Google servers in an encrypted form that Google can't read. That's been an option in the Chrome sync settings since nearly forever. Sign into a new instance of Chrome or Chromium-based Google-services browsers (Chromium, Dragon, etc.) and the browser will tell you that it can't access your synced data until you enter your private passphrase. Try to use the Google password management dashboard they recently added (or better surfaced) and you'll be told that you can't manage your passwords online because you're using a private passphrase. Data-mining thus not possible on that synced data.

  6. Fast But Crappy? by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 2

    "Edge Fastest, But Weak On Standards"

    Great, so Edge will show me a crappy, mangled page really really fast!

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  7. 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...
  8. standards matter more than miliseconds by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 4, Insightful

    if you want to render a webpage the fastest: cut corners (standards be damned!)
    if you want to render a webpage properly: don't use a microsoft product

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  9. Who cares how fast you get the wrong answer? by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The title is a coinage my wife would drop into discussions when engineers would try to deflect bug reports with claims of how fast the new code is.

    Related, for speedups of crash-buggy code: "So you've shortened the mean time to failure?"

    --
    Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
  10. They're all fast enough by Threni · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You can stop making browsers faster, putting more megapixels in camera sensors and resolution on phones, tablets and laptops, thanks. It's done; no-one's going to either notice or appreciate the difference any longer (apart from marketing, perhaps). You need to work on battery life, waterproofing (as in, actually waterproof), security and making the mobile experience better than the embarrassing ginger stepchild it currently is.

  11. Re:Try Edge on the Insider Preview Build by davester666 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What exactly is "amazing" about a multi-billion dollar, multinational software developer coding up a web browser?

    That they did it?
    That it runs?
    That significant parts of it are hard-coded into the OS, again?
    That it's more standards compliant that the previous version, even though it's the first version?
    That it works pretty good for a v1, given that normally Microsoft needs 3 major versions to get to that state?
    That the quality software known as Flash is BUILT INTO it?

    --
    Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  12. 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
  13. 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.