Quote:Microsoft loves to flaunt its benchmarks, even the weird ones. Now, the Redmond company is showing off how Edge is faster than before.

A blog post on its website says that Edge has achieved a First Contentful Paint (FCP) below 300ms. FCP is a metric created by Google, to measure the time taken to load the first piece of Document Object Model (DOM) content on a web page. In layman's terms, it's sort of a benchmark that tells how long it took for the first elements of a website to load. Apparently, waiting for more than 300 to 400ms for content to load can significantly impact user satisfaction, and that less than 300ms score is a global milestone.

According to Microsoft's report, several optimizations have been made to reduce loading times in Edge. It claims that the load time has been reduced by an average of 40% since the previous such update, in February 2025. Edge now loads various features faster including the Settings page, Split Screen, Workspaces. Read Aloud's startup time has been improved, and the playback is smoother.

How was this possible? In May 2024, Microsoft announced an internal project called WebUI 2.0, which is an improved UI architecture that reduces the amount of JavaScript code that runs during the initial loading, and also minimizes the size of its code bundles. Now, Microsoft has uploaded a 25-second video to highlight the performance difference between React and WebUI 2.0. It says that Edge is 4x faster to render some elements. Microsoft says that it is working on additional performance improvements across more features in Edge, including Print Preview, Extensions, and more. These improvements could land in a few months.

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