You can now download and run the web browser Microsoft Edge on your Mac, albeit in a developer test version that hasn’t even been granted an official beta test. Yet it’s a remarkably, surprisingly solid app even in this pre-launch edition. Even that we already know that its missing a couple of key features, still you can get a feel for whether Microsoft Edge is worth replacing Safari as your main browser.
A key reason that this early version is so robust, though, is the same reason that Microsoft has made this move at all. The company didn’t set out to make a Mac browser, it set out to convert its existing PC Edge into using Google’s Chromium system. That gets it a solid base that happens to also give it a Mac version.
And it’s what makes the Mac version of Microsoft Edge look very like the Mac version of Chrome. If you were thinking of moving from Safari and didn’t want to risk a pre-beta developer version of Microsoft Edge, you could download Chrome and you would get pretty much the same feel.
Not measuring specs
This is about how Edge feels in comparison to Safari, it’s not about benchmarking or measuring anything. That wouldn’t be either fair or even all that useful given how unfinished this release of Edge is.
That said, you can make some broad comparisons that are interesting. For a browser that looks like Chrome, for instance, Microsoft Edge currently takes up around a third less disk space than Google’s offer. But then if you’re tight on space, Safari is a head-scratching is-that-really-right ten times smaller than Edge.
Safari is also less CPU intensive than either the currently-shipping Chrome or this developer Edge.
We all tend to describe our preferred browser, whichever one it is, as feeling light and responsive and fast compared to the others. The key word there, though, is feeling. If you were checking out Activity Monitor while running these browsers or if you are on a MacBook with little space, you’d unquestionably say that Safari was the lightest.
Read more at Appleinsider.com