Microsoft Edge is built to deliver fast JavaScript performance, makes IE11 look like a snail

Microsoft has recently released Windows 10 build 10122 to 'fast ring' Insiders, and while this build is more of a step towards stability improvements, there are new features that have been added to Microsoft Edge as well, that are really worth testing unless you happen to use AMD GPUs.

Microsoft Edge (still branded as Project Spartan in build 10122) is a clean break from the past, even though its logo does carry a fair bit of familiarity with Internet Explorer. The engineers behind the new browser have recently detailed how they are using feedback and telemetry data from the web to make the Chakra JavaScript engine faster and more efficient when using modern hardware.

Cross file script inlining: "This optimization enables a lot more JavaScript code on the existing web to get inlined and run faster in Microsoft Edge".

Speeding up global constants using fixed field optimization: As more and more websites start to use the ECMAScript6 'const' construct, Microsoft Edge developers are improving Chakra's parser and the JIT compiler to extend "the performance oriented value proposition of the const statement in ECMAScript 6 to how constants are often used in the web as it exists today."

Improving performance of code within try-catch blocks: "Chakra’s compiler now has the capability to abstract out the code defined inside of the try-catch blocks and generate optimized JIT code for it."

Minified code now brings size and speed benefits: ?In a quick experiment on 4000 of the top 10000 sites, the Edge team confirmed that usage of minified code is much more popular than expected, so they used UglifyJS to yield between 20-50% performance improvements in relevant scenarios.

Array#indexOf optimizations: "This optimization helps improves the performance of ECMAScript5 Array#indexOf built-in in Chakra and Microsoft Edge by more than 5 times."

So what does all this mean for the non-technical end user? Well, it means the Edge team has made a lot of performance improvements that put the new browser far ahead of Internet Explorer 11, at least in synthetic benchmarks such as Google's Octane 2.0 and Apple's Jet Stream.

As you can see from the image above, Microsoft Edge is already more than 1.6 times faster than IE11 in Jet Stream, and 2.25 times faster in Octane 2.0. This is really impressive for a pre-release browser, while it is in no way a true measurement of real-world performance, it does show that Edge is shaping out as a modern and capable web browser, and hopefully much less of a pain for developers than Internet Explorer.

Source: Windows Blogs