New Delhi: In a recent blog post, Microsoft has reached a significant milestone in improving the speed of Edge’s user interface. It now takes Microsoft’s browser less than 300 milliseconds to start rendering the first parts of a website for users, whether it’s text, images, or parts of the user’s interface. It’s a metric known as First Contentful Paint that Google introduced in its Chrome browser in 2017. According to Microsoft, industry research shows that waiting longer than 300 to 400ms for the initial content can significantly impact user satisfaction.
However, while loading the first elements of a site in less than 300 milliseconds can help a browser feel fast and responsive, FCP is not an indication of how long it will take a site to load in its entirety. The upgrades could persuade some users to switch to Edge, which currently has less than 5% of the worldwide browser market share compared to Chrome’s 68%.
Microsoft may also soon face new competition from companies like OpenAI, which are considering introducing their browsers to complement existing AI web search tools. The improvements follow similar performance gains Microsoft highlighted in a previous blog post, 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 initialisation of the UI.
Microsoft said that Edge’s downloads, history, and creation of new private browsing tabs were on average about 40% faster. The company says it has since delivered similar performance improvements for 13 additional browser features, which include more responsive settings, split-screen that now provides near-instant navigation and fewer loading delays, and smoother playback for its AI-powered and accessibility-focused Read Aloud feature.
