Good news: navigating PDF documents on Edge is set to become smoother, especially on modest configurations. Microsoft is working on optimizations for its browser.
About two years ago, the Redmond company began transferring the PDF reader from Microsoft Edge to Adobe's. While the browser remains a reference for reading PDF documents, this change has not been without challenges. Indeed, some limitations persist on low-powered machines, and Microsoft may soon introduce new optimization tools to address these slow performance issues.
Recent tests conducted by Windows Latest on a virtual machine with 4GB of RAM reveal performance problems when opening large PDFs, particularly documents with 1,000 pages or more. Under these conditions, Edge struggles to display content, sometimes resulting in a blank page, while its competitor Google Chrome handles these documents without difficulty. The tests also uncovered a reference to a feature indicator called "msPdfOpenOnLowCoreDeviceWithDcPdfEnabled," which hints at performance improvements for PDF reading in Microsoft Edge.
