APRIL 2020 • TECH ADVISOR 55Performance
Against Chrome’s dominance, competing browsers
take what small advantage they can. Opera has its free,
unlimited VPN, and Brave, its searing focus on privacy
and its BAT token for paying creators with virtual
currency. Microsoft’s new Edge doesn’t really seem to
offer any particularly compelling angle – Collections,
maybe? Convenience? Speed? The latter two may be
the attributes that lure users over time, though it’s a
difficult topic to sell to a friend over coffee.
Still, here’s what we can say about Microsoft’s new
Edge: It’s as fast or faster than the current version of
Chrome, and among the leaders in terms of overall
speed. Obviously, the new Edge remains a work in
progress, and will see fluctuations in performance over
time. We tested using the Canary build downloaded
on 13 January – technically a beta, but close to what
should be the final version. (On the graphs below, the
Canary build is erroneously labelled as version 84,
when it should be version 81. The stable version that
willbepushedtoyourPCis version79.)It’senough
tocharacterize the new Edge as a solid effort.
We used the recent Surface Laptop 3 as a test
platform, downloading the most recent versions of
the Brave browser; Google Chrome; what we’ll call
the‘old’MicrosoftEdge;thenew,Chromium-based
Edge;Mozilla Firefox; Opera; and Vivaldi.
We carved out our testing into a number of different
browser tests. The first group, which encompasses
JetStream, MotionMark, and Speedometer, are
published by Browserbench.org. JetStream 2 uses a
variety of JavaScript and WebAssembly tests focused