In our tests of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, IE and Opera, the worst web browser for Windows 10 was easy to spot: Internet Explorer 11. But the best choice? That depends.
On earlier versions of Windows, the best browser you can run today is clearly Google Chrome. But, what about Windows 10? There, it's a different story.
With Windows 10, you have another choice: Microsoft's replacement for Internet Explorer (IE), Edge. For now Edge is only available on Windows 10. Since Microsoft recently open-sourced ChakraCore, Edge web browser JavaScript engine, it' possible we may yet see Edge running on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1. Indeed, Microsoft is porting ChakraCore to Ubuntu Linux!
When last I looked at Windows 10's web browsers, I looked at a late beta in June 2015. Now, Windows 10 has been released and then massively upgraded. For my tests on this run, I used Windows 10, version 10586.63, the latest update as of mid-January 2016.
I ran these performance tests on an Asus CM6730. This desktop PC is powered by a third-generation 3.4Ghz Intel Core i7-3770 processor. This is supported by a Nvidia GeForce GT 620 graphics card. The PC also has 8 GBs of RAM and a one TeraByte hard drive.
On this system, besides the latest versions of Edge (25) and IE 11, I tested at the latest versions of the most popular desktop web browsers. These are Chrome 49, Firefox 43, and Opera 34. I didn't include Safari in this round-up because Apple no longer releases new major versions of Safari for Windows. Apple does, however, still support Safari on Windows with security updates.
Here's how well each browser did on the respective benchmarks...
