Microsoft Edge Performance Evaluated 132
An anonymous reader writes: Now that Windows 10 is close to launch, Anandtech has put Microsoft's new browser, Edge, through a series of tests to see how it stacks up against other browsers. Edge has shown significant improvements since January. It handily beats Chrome and Firefox in Google's Octane 2.0 benchmark, and it managed the best score on the Sunspider benchmark as well. But Chrome and Firefox both still beat Edge in other tests, by small margins in the Kraken 1.1 and HTML5Test benchmarks, and larger ones in WebXPRT and Oort Online. The article says, "It is great to see Microsoft focusing on browser performance again, and especially not sitting idle since January, since the competition in this space has not been idle either."
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Re:Is Edge going to be portable to non Windows? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Is Edge going to be portable to non Windows? (Score:1)
Actually doing what you describe is a giant pain in the ass. Knowing how is limited. Who knows what happens in conversion (it depends!)...
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And before you say "but the rest of the world..." stop. Aside for that most people wouldn't bother with that level of redundancy, short of the linux NAS (which you can buy in most large computer stores ready to go - plug and play, so to speak) even my grandmother could figure out how to import a pdf to word online, and store it to as many cloud storage accounts as are bothered to sign up for.
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Talk about confirmation bias. Google and Apple have done that crud as well.
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Last I heard it's not even going to be portable to Windows 7 or 8.
Re:Is Edge going to be portable to non Windows? (Score:4, Funny)
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Only when kernel.org, freebsd Solaris, Apple, hp.com, xinuos.com, Haiku-os.org, IBM and mozilla.org all start paying the Microsoft license, like the Android hardware makers are already paying
Re: Is Edge going to be portable to non Windows? (Score:1)
ie did run on Unix in the past.
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IIRC, there were versions running on the very earliest versions of Mac OSX, which was built from BSD Unix. I don't think Apple got the Unix certification until much later versions, though.
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Haiku is UNIX? It's true what they say, you learn something new every day...
Oh, and Linux (not GNU/Linux for me, sorry) is not UNIX either. It's inspired by UNIX, absolutely, but it isn't technically related.
Ad blocking? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Enjoy your paywalls!
Re:Ad blocking? (Score:4, Insightful)
Enjoy your paywalls!
that would please me to no end. Dunno why people use that as a threat.
Sure beat the bejabbers out of a few dozen scripts and trackers on every page. And even better, if a website's content is shit, they'll be out of business soon enough.
Re:Ad blocking? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't that be more intrusive, though? If every page was paywalled or subscription-based...like, every page...then you're going to be on-file as paying a whole bunch of people. Even if micropayments actually become a thing again, you're going to have a service with a list of every site that you not only patronize, but that you like enough to pay for.
God, imagine the damage it would do if someone hacked and published a record of _that_.
Seems pretty dangerous to people in repressive regimes, too, since subscribing to any kind of opposition news is basically funding a political enemy, more directly than just loading ads on a page.
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Even if micropayments actually become a thing again, you're going to have a service with a list of every site that you not only patronize, but that you like enough to pay for. God, imagine the damage it would do if someone hacked and published a record of _that_.
This is actually a pretty creepy possibility already on fairly "generic" sites, it's one thing that people know you read a newspaper. With a subscription though they could list exactly what articles you bothered to read and which you didn't.
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You can already do all that with web server logs...
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there is a third way. Guess what: People actually make content without you wanting to pay for it. Yeah, strange as it may sound, people give you something for nothing. Like, say, this comment. Nobody is paying me to write this. Yet I do it. For your entertainment, and of course for mine.
If every page was sub-based and paywalled, two things would happen. First, at the very least a dozen payment providers would spring up over night where you can easily manage your subscriptions and where those who want to pay
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Microtransactions don't work on credit cards, since there's too much overhead. Somebody needs to batch them and bill monthly or so. The advantage is that your credit card data wouldn't tell anybody about that site of yours that you'd really rather keep secret, but the batching company would have to keep records on it. This would either become a monopoly (undesirable) or you'd have to register with several sites (also undesirable), or each web page supplier would have to register with all available sites
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Enjoy your paywalls!
How about this? Companies properly vet ads, and ensure they don't contain malware. And I'll turn off my ad-blocker, and we'll both be happy. But we already know that the companies don't want to vet ads in the first place.
On top of that we already know that sites that go paywall fail miserably. Only when you have unique content can a paywall stand, this is doubly true in today's "every site has exactly the same news, because our reporters don't report they simply recycle wire stories."
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I think the best ads are the native ads--that is, ads that resemble content, but are clearly marked as ads. Digg is currently the best example of this. There's one story box dedicated to an ad. It's easy to find, so it's easy to ignore. But because the advertisers aren't just some random weight loss spammer, the advertising box is actually something that I look at every day, just in case. I've clicked on more than one of those 'stories', but I NEVER click on standard banner ads.
Curation makes for better ads
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I think the best ads are the native ads--that is, ads that resemble content, but are clearly marked as ads. Digg is currently the best example of this. There's one story box dedicated to an ad. It's easy to find, so it's easy to ignore
A lot of companies have recently tried pushing that as news stories and not labeling them, it took Gamergate informing the FTC [gamergate.me] and the FTC updating and perusing action against companies for doing it. [reddit.com] Native ads? It's a way to make ads looks like news, and companies like Gakwer, Kotaku, et al., just got slapped down hard for it.
Then again I don't actually shop by ads, when I need something for a particular job I'm more likely to ask people who are ahead of me in the industry what they'd suggest, then I go
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Yes, it's important that the ads be clearly labelled as ads, and not as editorial content. The brilliance of the Digg model is that everything is basically just a link, a picture, and a small bit of explanatory context. Even if you were to mistake it as a real story, it would become obvious instantly that you weren't getting any news from the site you went to.
And since the advertisers are curated, you're also not going to have any trouble where going to the site is going to be some sort of miserable spam-fe
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That's like the "if there is no copyright it's the end of music" threat.
Guess what: Content existed on the internet before advertising came along. It was different and less refined, but it was certainly there. People produce it because they want to. Not for clicks, not for eyeballs but because they want to produce it.
Actually, your threat sounds like a promise to me. No clickbait anymore (and where it is, a paywall keeps me from having to look at it), with the actual content, made by people because they wan
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Guess what: Content existed on the internet before advertising came along. It was different and less refined, but it was certainly there. People produce it because they want to. Not for clicks, not for eyeballs but because they want to produce it.
People do create a lot of things because they want to, but that sounds more like an argument for free content rather than paywalled content. You really think there's no way to present content and ads in the same page without calls to external known ad servers to pull those ads in? There's no reason websites can't display their own ads from their own domain so what would prevent you from seeing that?
No clickbait anymore (and where it is, a paywall keeps me from having to look at it)
Why not? People would just put in clickbait without a paywall.
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The internet is no place for advertising.
I take it then that you are a subscriber to Slashdot --- and to every other site that you visit on a regular basis.
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The internet is no place for advertising.
I take it then that you are a subscriber to Slashdot --- and to every other site that you visit on a regular basis.
Sort of. Slashdot allows users to optionally disable advertising if their non-monetary contributions are awesome enough-- which mine are I guess. I assume that there are no ads to block, but I wouldn't know because the ads are blocked anyways. A belt-and-suspenders solution.
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It's not really difficult.
You just need to setup a local proxy that filters ads, and tell Edge to use this proxy.
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Good question. IE has had ad-blocking and tracking protection (same feature, Tracking Protection Lists just can also be used to block ads) for a few versions now, and I think there's actually a legit AdBlock Plus extension for IE (haven't tried it). On the other hand, Edge is supposed to be super-minimalist, and I'm not sure if it'll support any kind of browser add-in (at least, initially). Tracking Protection and TPLs like IE9-11 have had is harder to say (I haven't tried it yet).
Worst case you can always
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What world do you live in?
Error in the summary (Score:2, Informative)
"It is great to see Microsoft focusing on browser benchmarks again,"
You are welcome.
Re:Error in the summary (Score:4, Interesting)
According to the people at MS, they regularly test the most popular 500-1000 sites. You have to optimize for something, after all.
They also focus on standards compliance.
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If the benchmarks don't reflect the performance then the problem lies with the benchmark unless it can be proven than one of the contestants have cheated.
Given that Edge appears to be gaining across the board of several different benchmarks focusing on several different elements including also standards compliance I would say that by focusing on the benchmarks they are well and truly focusing on performance as well.
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Anyway, the main reason Id never recommend anyone use a microsoft browser is they are always tied to closely to the OS and just an easy gateway for malware.
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Anyway, the main reason Id never recommend anyone use a microsoft browser is they are always tied to closely to the OS and just an easy gateway for malware.
In which way tied? In Windows 98, Explorer depended on the IE engine, but that's about it.
These days both IE and Edge run content in a hardened sandbox anyway, which malware will have hard time escaping.
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Too late for?..
I mean, anything that gives us an out from the Google ecosystem, without Firefox bloat, has got to be great.
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Err we've been down this path before, its kinda where we came from.
I thought it was pretty unanimous that we DIDN'T want to go back.
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Maybe we don't want to go back, but we sure don't want to stay here either. Google used to be a knight in shining armor, not so much these days. Their market share is big enough that they can get away with almost anything they want--so, put them up against competition again, and see if 'being the good guys' turns back into a desirable market strategy.
Yeah I'm not getting my hopes up either.
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Agreed, Google simply ignores negative user feedback: I've seen it with Google Maps and Google News, and I hear there are other instances as well. I've stopped using anything Google, not that it makes an ounce of difference to them.
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Google does okay and is less evil than some. Chrome even runs netflix in linux now apparently, though I haven't used that much. My biggest gripe about google is their maps program. It works quite well if you are online, but also inexplicably eats bandwidth quite fast. It seems to have some pretty drastic limitations when you are not online such that you probably want to use something else. From what I recall even if you save the map it doesn't work correctly when not online right? I know it did some i
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It doesn't make them evil to offer useful tools in exchange for usage metrics, it just means we have more options.
But sure, if you don't want to pay in metrics, put some of your money on the table for a solution that fits you better
But expecting Google to modify their money-free service into a totally free service (free of data collection) would mean that it's no longer funded, and you know what happens to unfunded software/services? I'll
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Google used to be a knight in shining armor, not so much these days.
Google was NEVER a knight in shining armor. The only thing that changed was that they got caught pulling the same sort of shit just about every other corporation on the planet does, and now very few people believe that "don't be evil" nonsense. You got it almost correct - it was a "marketing strategy", not a "market strategy", and it was brilliantly done.
Giant corporations are like nuclear power plants. Their production capacity is pretty much unmatched, but you also have to take great care to ensure the
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I suspect it was more than a marketing strategy, but a recruitment one.
It's entirely possible that "Don't be evil" started out sincere, but that sort of thing tends to slip when a company goes public.
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Too late for?..
I mean, anything that gives us an out from the Google ecosystem, without Firefox bloat, has got to be great.
So something fromMicrosoft will cure the problem?
You mean the people who allow people that you allow access to your wireless to share the password with the world?
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You mean the people who allow people that you allow access to your wireless to share the password with the world?
Do you really boycott every company that you find objectionable? How do you get out of bed? How do you even have a bed?
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You mean the people who allow people that you allow access to your wireless to share the password with the world?
Do you really boycott every company that you find objectionable? How do you get out of bed? How do you even have a bed?
Do you have such an active imagination that you extrapolated that from my dislike of Wi-Fi Sense?
You having a bad day or somethig bro?
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Except, now, people are having to code specifics just to render in Firefox appropriately. It sucked having to do it for Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It sucks having to do it for Mozilla's Firefox.
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Another?
Wake me up when Chrome, Firefox, or Safari comply with standards and don't shit things up in random ways every time they update.
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Another?
Wake me up when Chrome, Firefox, or Safari comply with standards and don't shit things up in random ways every time they update.
Maybe some competition will stimulate the fixing of bugs.
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Another? Wake me up when Chrome, Firefox, or Safari comply with standards and don't shit things up in random ways every time they update.
Wake me up when the standards are actually finalized and not "eh we'll get around to it, maybe, oh you know what, nevermind it's just a rolling release moving target now"
I need a new browser like I need a shark (Score:1)
Hmm, maybe if it had lasers ....
On the other hand, I still don't need a new browser.
But does it run on Linux? (Score:1)
Obvious question.
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It works perfectly well for me.
I want to love Edge (Score:1)
don't worry (Score:2, Funny)
the whole rest of the world will wait patiently for you to catch up
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That's what your second (third, fourth, etc.) monitor is for.
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Why do you want to love Edge? Why don't you rather want to love the best browser out there?
A web browser is a tool. When you've got a nail to pound the right tool is a hammer. When you have a hole to drill the right tool is a drill.
Why would you not look for the best tool, instead of the new-one that says "microsoft" on it?
E
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I didn't try Edge, but even IE11 is leagues beyond Firefox for development at this point (oh how the mighties have fallen), and for certain things like sourcemaps, it works better than even Chrome (less glitches/edge cases, easier toggling between original and compiled sources, etc). That isn't bad for a browser that was less than a joke not that long ago. Chrome's still my development browser of choice (and now I'm stuck on a Mac at work anyway), but at least there's more than 1 usable browser for developm
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Are you counting Firefox with or without Firebug? Feature-wise, Firebug is still pretty much the gold standard... but it's dog-slow even without turning on the optional stuff that makes it even slower, and it's a third-party aftermarket install. Firefox's built-in dev tools have gotten better in the last few builds, but (as you noted) are still well behind IE11 (or Chrome). I haven't tried Edge yet.
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With and without, doesn't matter. Firebug is way behind IE (remember, IE11 is also a constantly updated browser...the tools aren't what they were when IE11 was launched), and has been eclipsed by Chrome's years ago.
Give it a few patches (Score:2)
Every MS system or subsystem works great when it's coming out of its box.
No later than the first major Service Pack, it grinds to a halt. Sadly, especially with browsers, not patching is not an option due to the amount of security holes. The tinfoil hat wearing me would actually claim that they deliberately leave out important security checks to speed up execution so their latest turd shines in the all important pre-release performance benchmark, and reintroduce that safety checks again once nobody bothers
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They said that about Facebook too. Now look how many pages you can't use without that shit.
Was performance a major issue? (Score:2)
I always thought it was security and compatibility that drove people away from Microsoft browsers.
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With today's crappy browsers, the biggest factor in page loading is that the browser doesn't crash trying to render it.
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Optical bandwidth, 64 bit OS, i7, real gpu, 32 gigs of ram can cover for a browser with slow code issues?
The browser has to be fast to serve ads, keep banking secure, keep the MS branding fresh in the users mind and be web standard compliant.
The days of only working with a MS web site creation application are over but the same MS branding issues will always be the same.
Fast is easy. Ad blocking, security, branding is the on
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Cock-nugget. :D
Haven't heard that one before.