According to a recent blog entry on Microsoft’s Windows site, the company has achieved a significant breakthrough in enhancing the speed of Edge’s user interface. Now, Microsoft’s browser can begin displaying the first elements of a website, such as text, images, or interface components, in under 300 milliseconds.
This speed measure is called First Contentful Paint (FCP), a benchmark Google implemented with its Chrome browser back in 2017. Microsoft points out that “industry research demonstrates that exceeding 300 to 400 milliseconds for initial content display can greatly affect user satisfaction.” Nonetheless, while showing the first parts of a website in less than 300 milliseconds can make a browser seem quick and responsive, FCP does not gauge the full loading time for an entire site.
These advancements might convince more users to try Edge, which currently holds a market share of less than five percent globally while Chrome dominates with 68 percent. Additionally, Microsoft might soon contend with fresh competition from companies like OpenAI, which are contemplating launching their own browsers to enhance existing AI web search functionalities.
The improvements follow similar performance gains Microsoft has highlighted in previous blog posts made possible by the company’s continued efforts to migrate Edge’s user interface to a faster WebUI 2.0 architecture that “minimizes the size of our code bundles, and the amount of JavaScript code that runs during the initialization of the UI.”
Last February, Microsoft said that Edge’s downloads, history, and creating new private browsing tabs were on average, about 40 percent faster. The company says it has since delivered similar performance improvements for 13 additional browser features, including settings that are more responsive, split screen that now provides “near-instant navigation and less loading delays,” and smoother playback for its AI-powered and accessibility-focused Read aloud feature.
In the coming months, Microsoft plans to introduce additional performance improvements to Edge for features like Print Preview and Extensions.
