Microsoft promises speed boost for Edge in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update will be released soon, and one of the improvements of this minor feature update for Windows 10 sees Microsoft Edge render sites faster thanks to a series of improvements.

Microsoft Edge is the default browser on Windows 10. While that helped give it a couple of percent of usage share in the browser market, it never managed to absorb the usage share losses of Internet Explorer.

There are several reasons that hold Edge back; the fact that it is only available for Windows 10, the lack of browser extensions, and the rather minimal nature of the browser are all key points that play a role.

Performance however is not mentioned usually when it comes to issues that users have with Edge.

Microsoft announced yesterday that Microsoft Edge will ship with a new version of Edge HTML, the browser's rendering engine. The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update version of Microsoft Edge will ship with Edge HTML 16, and Microsoft promises that it will improve rendering performance significantly for users.

By offloading rendering to a separate (parallel) thread, independent rendering can improve page load and dynamic content updates, while more efficiently utilizing multicore CPUs.

Microsoft's engineering team improved the browser's independent rendering pipeline and the result of the optimization is what will boost Edge's rendering performance.

EdgeHTML 15 could not take full advantage of independent rendering, a technique that moves the rendering to its own thread to improve the web page loading performance, as select elements on a page could disable the feature entirely.

These elements, the <select> control, <canvas> element and some <svg> elements (Clip-path, Gradients, Markers, Masks, Patterns), are supported with EdgeHTML 16 so that they no longer disable independent rendering on pages that make use of them.

Microsoft added graphs to the announcement that highlight the improvement. These graphs, with the exception of one, lack values however so that it is difficult to assess the improvement.

The one value that Microsoft reveals is that the Fall Creators Update version of Edge performs 43% better in MotionMark than the Creators Update version of the web browser.

Windows Insiders can test the improvements already in the most recent builds of the browser. Users who are on a stable version of Windows 10 will get the improvements with the release of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update in September/October.

Now You: Have you tried Microsoft Edge? What's your take on the browser?