Windows 10 has many new fancy features, you can read all about them and get them yourself by reading our Windows 10 roundup, but as with many operating systems it will most often be used to simply launch a web browser. Thankfully, Microsoft has a brand new browser for its new operating system – called 'Project Spartan' in development (a reference to the company's Halo games), it's been officially dubbed Microsoft Edge.
The new app will be the default browser for PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones running Windows 10. Google has made a big enough success of Chrome for no one to be worried about the potential monopoly of a bundled browser. The new browser will integrate with a lot of Microsoft's other services, such as the Cortana personal assistant (yes, another Halo reference). It has also removed support for a lot of outdated web standards, such as ActiveX, so it should be slimmer and faster. That's no bad thing, as Internet Explorer has been somewhat bogged down by support for such old standards.
We ran some benchmarks on the latest versions of Edge, Internet Explorer and their big rival Chrome, in order to see which was quickest. The results as you can see say more about how hard it is to test browsers than they do about the browsers themselves. The benchmarks couldn't agree on very much at all.
| Browsermark | Peacekeeper | Sunspider 1.0.2 | Octane 2.0 | |
| Microsoft Edge | 2278 | 1302 (5 of 7) | 185ms | 12,875 |
| Chrome | 3593 | 1664 (7 of 7) | 532ms | 13,681 |
| Internet Explorer | 2147 | 1644 (5 of 7) | 209ms | 7,648 |
Browsermark indicated that Edge was a little quicker than IE, but was still well behind Chrome. Octane suggested that Edge was level pegging with Chrome, easily outstripping IE. However, Edge scored last in Peacekeeper, behind Chrome and IE on similar scores; and the Sunspider scores, where Chrome lags miles, behind just throw further confusion into the mix. In short, the benchmarks all have their favourites and there's no easy to discern pattern, except that in general Edge seems to be a bit quicker than Internet Explorer.
We also did some ad-hoc testing on system resource usage. We did this by opening up five tabs in each browser with the same sites in each. We used a few of the big UK news homepages: BBC news, The Daily Mail, The Guardian and The Telegraph, plus Expert Reviews of course. We then used the Task Manager to total up the memory usage of all the processes used and the memory footprint.
| Memory usage | CPU usage | |
| Microsoft Edge | 765MB | 22% |
| Chrome | 517MB | 13% |
| Internet Explorer | 457MB | 15% |
We were surprised to find that the Edge browser, admittedly still in beta, was the hungriest of the three tested. It used 765MB of memory, compared to around 500MB for the other two browsers, and its CPU usage was also higher at 22%, versus the 13 and 15% of Chrome and IE respectively. We ran the test again with different sites and got similar results.
All the tests were done on a Dell XPS 11 laptop with an Intel Core i5 processor, SSD storage and 4GB of RAM. It's not the most powerful laptop by a long stretch, but it's exactly the kind of slender hybrid device that Microsoft is targeting with Windows 10, and should have plenty enough power to run a few browser tabs.
It's early days obviously, with Windows 10 and Edge not scheduled for launch until much later in the year, but we're both concerned and curious as to why the sleek new browser was so memory hungry. It's not going to be a big problem on laptops like ours, but running on tablets and phones as well, the browser needs to maintain a much smaller presence than this.
