Fortunately for those who do want something that is only available in the Chrome Web Store, downloading and adding them to Microsoft Edge is simple: simply toggle “Allow extensions from other stores” on the Edge Extensions page. The Microsoft Store’s collection of extensions continues to grow to a point where most users probably won’t need to add Chrome extensions as well. While the move to Chromium delivered a lot of things to Edge, one of the most crucial for power users was support for extensions. I then viewed the relevant app’s CPU and memory usage in Windows 10’s Task Manager to measure the impact. I loaded the same collection of four tabs on each browser: the Laptop Mag home page, a running 1080p YouTube video, Twitter and Google Docs. In my months of sticking with Edge as my primary browser I have definitely pushed it to its limits and bogged my laptop down with it at times, but that’s attributable to my own bad habits of loading far too many windows and tabs at once.Īgain, prior to each test I restarted my laptop and made sure that no other applications were running. Even Chrome’s most ardent fan would concede that it can be a resource hog, but Google has thrown a lot of attention at this problem over the last year. Next, I took a look at the system impact that each of these browsers had on my laptop. I’m going to give the win in this category to Microsoft Edge, but it remains close enough that I wouldn’t make a determination on this factor alone. Google Chrome finished with a 73, winning four of the six categories, but not by enough.

Microsoft Edge claimed the win by a reasonably narrow margin with a total score of 76, based largely on a much stronger performance in the Encrypt Notes and OCR Scan test.

Before testing each browser, I restarted my laptop and ensured nothing else was running to get as close as possible to identical conditions.

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