Engineers at Microsoft recently announced performance improvements for their Edge browser.  A blog post that the company published recently explained how.

A blog post from the company explained how:

“Beginning with Microsoft Edge 102 on Windows, Microsoft Edge automatically compresses disk caches on devices that meet eligibility checks, to ensure the compression will be beneficial without degrading performance.

This ensures compression of these caches largely improves performance and overall user experience.

One way we can maximize cache usage while minimizing disk usage is by leveraging compression to save disk space for the cached content.  Since the contents in these cache(s) are often highly compressible, compression results in increasing the likelihood that the requested resource can be fetched from the disk.”

In our view, this is a great move.  Many people set up their systems with a large disk cache, allowing their web browser to store vast amounts of information for faster recall later.

The problem is that disk space is not unlimited, and if it’s at a premium on your system, compression neatly solves the problem.  The system can still store vast amounts of web data so it can be recalled more quickly later but until that happens, it saves on space by compressing it.

This change comes on the heels of another that the company rolled out some months ago. That change introduced improvements to the way the Edge browser used memory and CPU power.  In that case, the company “put unused browser tabs to sleep” which resulted in an average reduction of CPU usage of 37 percent while simultaneously reducing memory usage by 32 percent.  Those are solid numbers.

Best of all, the company says they’re still not done.  On deck are improvements to the Edge browser’s security, which will include features that should help to minimize the risk of undiscovered zero-day vulnerabilities from being exploited.

Kudos to Microsoft.  These are excellent changes that greatly improve the browser.