Everyone not running Edge raise your hands – not so fast
If you’re on Windows, chances are you’ve had your runin with Microsoft Edge popping up and discovering you’ve got a Capitol One payment plugin installed – oh that went over to your Chrome wonder how that happened. Whatever, you don’t want to run Edge, you don’t have to. Or do you?
Hint: you probably do.
It appears even not running Edge I am running Edge – yup, Edge startup boost sits around taking up memory. Not terrible but not something you need if you’re not running Edge, and even if you are it’s not needed.
The listed way to turn it off is by going to edge://settings/system and turning Startup Boost off. This saves about 200 meg of memory it looks like on testing (not the screenshot above).
So turning it off has no effect on the msedgewebview2 application, which seems to be another 40 meg of Edge you can’t get rid of, even though I’m not using Edge. Looks like that has more to do with Office, which means I’m using Edge evidently. Sigh.
A quarter gig of memory lost to Edge may not seem like much these days when everyone’s got their potatoes in a bucket, but I literally cannot see a different between when the Startup Boost is on or off.
Edge is a decent browser, but after the plugin fiasco I’m not particularly feeling kind to MS.
[Ghacks]
