14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Edge is Windows 10’s new browser for PCs, tablets, and smartphones, and will debut later this year with a new UI, plenty of features, and a brand new engine supposed to make browsing blazing fast.
Microsoft has already posted benchmark results to show that Edge is faster than its rivals, despite the fact that it’s still in development, but the company now comes back to explain how exactly it managed to make its browser so fast.
It turns out that Intel too was involved in the development process of Edge, and Microsoft says that this isn’t something new because this particular company helped improve Chakra, the JavaScript engine used by Edge and Internet Explorer since 2012.
“Intel expanded its efforts by contributing to the larger Microsoft Edge codebase, specifically focused in the areas of graphics and performance optimizations. Intel has been a major contributor to open source browser engines such as WebKit, Blink, and Gecko, and with our expanded collaboration, they are now directly contributing to the Microsoft Edge codebase to deliver an improved browsing experience for Windows 10,” Microsoft says.
Specifically, Intel is working with Microsoft to implement Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), an ECMAScript system, in Chakra and Microsoft Edge, which should allow performing the same operation on multiple values at the same time and thus provide faster code execution.
Graphics and layout improvements thanks to Intel
And that’s not all. Since the collaboration between the two is going so well, Intel has recently started focusing on the graphics, layout, and other features of Microsoft Edge, so in case you like how the browser looks and feels, Microsoft is not the only company you should thank to.
For instance, Intel worked with the Redmond-based tech giant to improve page load time when several inline elements are detected, but also on optimizations to reduce DOM parse times for text-area elements, as Microsoft itself explains.
“This is only the beginning,” the company adds, and since Edge is projected to receive so many goodies in the coming months, expect Intel’s involvement to go even further.