Microsoft makes 'most important features' of Edge significantly faster

About a year ago, Microsoft unveiled a transition from React to WebUI 2.0 for Edge in an attempt to make the browser faster, especially on lower-end devices that cannot boast the fastest processors and SSDs. It all started with the introduction of WebUI 2.0 for the Browser Essentials interface in Edge 122, and now, Microsoft is supercharging more parts of its browser.

In a new blog post, Microsoft announced that "no less than 14" different areas of the user interface in Microsoft Edge now use WebUI 2.0 instead of React. They include components like Favorites, Browser Essentials, Downloads, and more. As a result, they load up to 40% faster than before on average. Here is an example showing Microsoft Edge opening the downloads interface over 50% faster:

Here is another example that shows a massive performance improvement when loading Browser Essentials:

Microsoft says these performance improvements were made possible by minimizing the size of code bundles and the amount of unnecessarily shared code between components:

In this project, we built an entirely new markup-first architecture that minimizes the size of our bundles of code, and the amount of JavaScript code that runs during the initialization path of the UI. This new internal UI architecture is more modular, and we now rely on a repository of web components that are tuned for performance on modern web engines. 

Although Edge already has many of its UI parts based on WebUI 2.0, there are still plenty of components left to upgrade. Future Microsoft Edge updates will bring WebUI 2.0 to other important interface areas like the Settings section, print preview, Read Aloud, and more.

All these performance improvements are available in Microsoft Edge 132, which was released in January 2025. To check your Microsoft Edge version, head to edge://settings/help or edge://version. In other news, Microsoft also shipped a big update for Edge's built-in Surf game, which now features more customization, a new game mode, reworked graphics, and more.

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