Have feedback on the performance of Edge? We're Listening!

Eleanor_Huynh Thank you so much for this post! Some quick suggestions I've always wanted in browsers in terms of performance:

1. Almost everyone uses extensions. But sometimes, you use a browser and after years of slowly adding extensions, you don't realize how slow your browser has gotten. I would appreciate a speed impact list of the users's installed extensions, showing the relative performance loss--primarily focused on the worst offenders. I know a few extension developers might get upset ("It's not that bad!"), but directing users to slow/bloated extensions would be a huge benefit for both casual ("are nine toolbars bad?") and performance users ("Wow, Honey embeds how many bloated scripts?")

Because Microsoft's talented team can work incredibly hard on making a fast browser & a few bad extensions could absolutely tank a user's experience. This focus would guide extension developers, too, towards making modern, performant extensions. Or, if it's not a stick, a carrot isn't bad, either: "Performance-approved extension".

Making performance data user-friendly (i.e., see Screen Time by Apple in iOS 12) can be difficult, but when done properly, you'll get the most loyal evangelicals: the enthusiast community.

2. One elephant in the room: auto-playing video/audio advertisements. For users, these ads unequivocally degrade network performance, gobble bandwidth, steal CPU & GPU cycles, increase battery drain, etc. It's exchanging pennies to manipulate human psychology + degrade device performance: that's a bad deal. The Edge Team mentioned https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c094uf/hi_reddit_were_the_team_behind_microsoft_edge_and/er34xbw/ for "user feedback whether Edge should block ads natively": 

Finally, we occasionally hear requests for a built in ad blocking experiences in Edge. For most users, we find that extensions (combined with strong defaults around tracking prevention) are the best option here because you can choose from a variety of experiences and defaults, but we absolutely want to hear from you if you think this should be built in.

For auto-playing videos & audio, make it built-in. Full stop. Blocking them should be on by default, with easy options to allow auto-play once and allow auto-play permanently on user-chosen domains. We killed pop-ups. Let's kill these, too: it's a hijack, pure and simple. I'll leave it at that for now: I don't want to derail this thread, as this ad-blocking discussion unfortunately crowds out other optimizations (i.e., for those who already block auto-playing ads, etc.).

3. Battery performance is critical and whatever can be done should be done. I've not benchmarked Chromium Edge on my laptop, but browsers are the top application used by the majority of consumers (i.e., not prosumers). If they're not optimized, we've already lost half the battle. 

With Edge Classic, I absolutely noticed an improvement in battery life, but due to website compatibility issues, I went back to Firefox. If we can bring ALL the battery performance optimizations (or as much as possible) from Classic Edge to Chromium Edge, that'd really motivate users on low-end and/or performance-optimized devices to migrate.

Who doesn't want a browser that improved battery life, vs the standard fare choicese? https://microsoftedge.github.io/videotest/2018-10/video.html

Perhaps the extension performance scores from the first idea can detail battery life impact, too. :)

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All in all, Microsoft has an incredibly unique opportunity to meld the great majority of users' interests with Microsoft's own in this once-in-a-development-generation shift towards the Chromium engine. Be the performant browser and users will come in droves.