Microsoft just made Edge faster on Windows 11, so I tested it against Chrome

Published Nov 10, 2026, 8:00 AM EST Aggy is a veteran writer and editor in the technology and gaming space. Having served as a Managing Editor for high-traffic digital publications, alongside being an editor and consultant for over a dozen sites. Aggy's published work spans a wide and respected array of tech and gaming outlets, including WePC, Screen Rant, How-To Geek, Android Police, PC Invasion, and Try Hard Guides. Beyond editorial work, Aggy's direct experience in the tech sphere extends to app development. Aggy has published two games under Tales and is always eager to learn and do more. He also likes working on computers and researching in his spare time. He knows about Windows, Linux, Audio, Video, and much more. I've been annoyed for years by that awkward gap between clicking a browser icon and actually seeing a window. It's only a couple of seconds, but it happens dozens of times a day, and it adds up. It also feels like we're too far in the future for this to be an issue. Microsoft seems to have fixed this in Edge on Windows 11, and Chrome is what it is being tested against. So I set up a few launch tests on real machines to see what changed and what didn't. Microsoft Edge is faster, but for good reasons Edge does its chores before you click Opening a browser the usual way means Windows has a bunch of chores to finish before anything shows up. It pulls the program file off storage, loads it into memory, hooks up all the system libraries it needs, sets up security sandboxes, and builds the internal communication channels the browser relies on. After all that is done, Windows can let the browser start loading its own parts, like the JavaScript engine and the interface. That whole chain eats time, and that's what you're noticing. Edge's Startup Boost shortens that chain by handling most of it before you click the icon. When you log into Windows, or right after you shut the last Edge window, Edge starts up a slimmed-down copy of itself in the background. So when you really launch it, Windows jumps straight to the final step. All it needs to do is draw a window and wire it to the background skeleton that's already running. So it's like the browser shows up almost immediately. To keep that background footprint tiny, Edge leaves only a few processes running. The main browser process that handles your profile and interface, the GPU process for rendering, the network service for connections, and a crash monitor all keep running. Anything tied to tabs gets shut down. You get the speed boost without Edge eating your RAM. It was smart for Microsoft to focus on launch speed instead of page loading speed because those are two different problems. Once a browser window is open and you start navigating, Edge and Chrome act the same, since they both run on Chromium. They parse web pages the same way, run JavaScript through V8, and use the same networking stack. So Microsoft couldn't really make Edge faster at loading sites, but it could make the window appear faster. How I tested Edge and Chrome Edge won the launch race by a lot I tested on one machine with steady conditions, so the results would show the real launch speed gap instead of background noise from the OS. The main thing I compared was what each browser does when it isn't open. Chrome shuts everything down when you close the last window, and its background mode only keeps processes alive if an extension specifically asks for it. Edge's Startup Boost also checks your setup first, so it won't turn on by default on machines with 4 GB of RAM or less and an older hard drive, and it switches itself off if certain extensions are installed. I tested launches in a few different scenarios, like cold launches right after a reboot with nothing cached, warm launches after closing the browser where Windows had already cached the program files, and background-assisted launches where Edge's processes were already running in the background. I ran each scenario a few times and averaged the results. Startup Boost is way too fast to feel fair. Chrome takes about two to three seconds to open, and on my regular PC it takes around five to seven seconds. Edge is so fast that it opens in milliseconds. There's no competition here. I also double-checked page loading in case the faster launch carried over into actual browsing. I didn't see a difference. Page loading really depends on your internet speed, because when I tried separate computers, the one with the Ethernet cable won. Where the gains stop when the app is open This works, but it isn't the best feature of everything Saving a few seconds when opening a browser won't really make that much of a difference. Startup Boost does nothing once the browser is open, so I wouldn't call it life-changing. If you're waiting for a slow website or a heavy web app, that is exactly the same whether Startup Boost is on or off. If you open and close browser windows all day, or often click links in Outlook or Teams and want the browser to pop up right away, the difference is noticeable. It makes the system feel snappier even if no single click is much faster. There are some real trade-offs too. Edge works hard to keep its background footprint light by lowering its own CPU and memory priority when idle, but it still takes up virtual memory. If your system is under heavy memory pressure from other apps, Windows can page out Edge's background processes to free up RAM. If that happens, and you then launch Edge, it has to read those pages back from disk, and your launch time can actually end up worse than a normal cold start. Startup Boost also doesn't work in every situation. It disables itself on low-RAM machines with older hard drives, since keeping background processes alive would just slow down the whole system. Certain browser extensions that open windows on their own also cause it to turn off automatically, since Edge can't have those extensions popping up while it's running in the background. This does work, but I don't think it's the best feature every The gains are real, but you'll only notice them in certain situations. It depends on your hardware and extensions, and what you do. It's not a big performance overhaul. It's just a smart bit of Windows integration that makes one moment faster. I wouldn't call it amazing.