Microsoft is making Edge faster... starting with this one menu

Browser bloat has long been a problem, but now Microsoft is doing something about it, and not by reducing features but by speeding the browser up. The company is working to make Edge’s user interface more responsive, starting with its Browser Essentials menu.

This menu — which displays information about Edge’s performance — is now 42 percent faster, thanks to a WebUI 2.0 architecture migration. You can see how much faster the Browser Essentials menu loads on WebUI 2.0 compared to React and WebUI with Javascript in the video below. Microsoft says the menu is 76 percent faster on devices without an SSD or with less than 8GB of RAM.

Additionally, Microsoft is giving Edge’s favorites menu a speed boost in build 124, making it 40 percent faster. Edge’s history, downloads, and wallet features will eventually get the WebUI 2.0 upgrade, too.

Microsoft says it built WebUI 2.0 after finding that many of Edge’s components used bundles of code that were “too large.” WebUI 2.0 changes things by shrinking these bundles and using a “more modular” architecture. “We now rely on a repository of web components that are tuned for performance on modern web engines,” Microsoft says.

As someone who prefers using Edge over other browsers, I appreciate the speed boost. But with the Copilot integration and the mountain of other tools Microsoft has stuffed inside its sidebar, it could stand to lose a few features to make the experience as smooth as it used to be.