Microsoft's secret Edge for iOS beats Safari by 15% using its own engine

Kyle Pflug, a product lead at Microsoft Edge, decided to run some rogue benchmarks on his personal iPhone. Instead of using the mandatory, Apple-approved WebKit engine, he loaded up a prototype of Edge running on Chromium's Blink engine.

The results of this little experiment were embarrassing for Apple. In the Speedometer 3.1 test, which measures how fast a browser actually handles web apps, the Chromium prototype scored 49.27 points against Safari’s 38.3. That means Microsoft's forbidden engine is 28.6% faster at loading modern websites than Apple's native champion.

The domination continued across the board. In the JetStream 3 JavaScript benchmark, the Blink prototype clocked 306.35 points, leaving Safari behind at 270.9. Even in graphics rendering, measured by MotionMark 1.3.1, the prototype squeezed out a win with 4773.52 points over Safari's 4673.68, showing that Apple's tight grip on iOS graphics isn't as bulletproof as they claim.

But do not expect to download this speed demon from the App Store tomorrow. Microsoft is calling this a pure research prototype, and the tech giant has no official plans to release it to the public anytime soon. This hesitation is because Apple's compliance with the EU's Digital Markets Act is a bureaucratic nightmare, requiring developers to publish alternative-engine browsers as entirely separate apps, effectively killing their existing user bases.

The fact that a giant like Microsoft has to play hide-and-seek with experimental code just to show how slow the iPhone's forced engine really is shows the tragedy of mobile monopolies. Hundreds of millions of iOS users are stuck paying a premium price for hardware, only to have their web browsing intentionally throttled by corporate protectionism disguised as security.

Source: MacRumors