Microsoft Edge has seen steady improvements over the course of the year, and a new innovation in testing promises to improve the browser’s performance by keeping a close eye on misbehaving extensions that are hogging too many resources.
Newwin have noticed the introduction of the ‘extension performance detector’ feature in Edge (Canary v130, meaning an early test version). This feature warns you if certain browser extensions are repeatedly slowing down Edge.
The alert that appears when this happens tells you how much slowdown your browser extensions are causing, and breaks down the impact of each extension, with the worst offenders at the top. You can press a button to disable any of these extensions right away to improve your browser’s performance.
Extensions can be very useful, but they can also bring potential pitfalls
For the uninitiated, browser extensions are compact add-ons that install into Edge (or other browsers) and add extra functionality. For example, they can instantly translate the content of a web page or read a page out loud.
While such add-ons can provide powerful additional functionality in a convenient way, some extensions may malfunction and potentially degrade the performance of your browser, or worse, the overall performance of your device.
As mentioned, this feature is currently only available in the Canary build of Edge (where it can be enabled with a flag). It’s likely unstable in its current experimental form, but hopefully Microsoft will iron out any issues and the extension performance detector tool will eventually make it into the full release of Edge.
I look forward to this capability coming to the stable version of Edge, as extensions can definitely mess with your browser’s performance in some cases, and sometimes without you even realizing that it’s an extension causing the problem. So a feature that constantly looks for such failed extensions will be worth its weight in gold.
Microsoft has made a number of improvements to Edge in 2024, including other activities to improve browser performanceand to Better organize and streamline Edge’s settings pagewhich is quite a mess these days.