New browser performance measuring tools for Android announced by Microsoft

There’s no doubt that many of us use some browsers that others haven’t even heard about, instead of the conventional choices out there.

And it’s true that performance is typically a very important factor for users trying to decide between different web browsing options.

The biggest competitors, Microsoft and Google, are constantly coming up with new ways to enhance performance on their Edge and Chrome browsers.

However, now, Microsoft introduced a set of open-source tools for Linux and Android, called Microsoft-Performance-Tools that can be used to measure browser performance across a variety of systems.

We are getting new measuring tools for Linux and Android

Don’t be fooled by the toolset’s appearance, because even though it appears to be general-purpose, Microsoft has emphasized that it can be used to monitor and measure browser performance.

This entire trace processing tooling is based on the same methodology that was used to improve the performance of the Windows OS in the past couple of decades.

The upcoming software can be used to offer more insights into what the OS and the app code are doing at a point in time, and if you want, you can also correlate the traces with Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA).

The toolset itself is built on .NET Core and microsoft-performance-toolkit-sdk, which means that it is theoretically supported on any OS that .NET Core supports.

For Linux, we support LTTng, perf, and Perfetto. For Android and Chromium browsers such as Chrome & Edge Chromium, we support Perfetto.

Here is the current tracing supported:

• LTTng (Linux Kernel CPU scheduling, Processes, Threads, Block IO/Disk, Syscalls, File events, etc)
• perf Linux CPU Sampling(cpu-clock)
• Perfetto Android & Chromium (CPU Scheduling, CPU Sampling, CPU Frequency, FTrace, Android Logs, Generic Events / Default Tracks, GPU Counters)

The tooling supports parsing and also analyzing the above tracing. Capturing, as well recording a trace is different for each type of tracing tool and is covered in How to capture a trace or logs.

Furthermore, the tech giant noted that any program or GUI on any OS can process events with the Microsoft-Performance-Tools SDK & Linux-Android plugins.

Microsoft itself is using this toolset to measure performance in Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA), Azure Linux VMs, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), and its Edge browser on multiple platforms.

The hope is that, by using the tooling to analyze & improve performance, more insight on drive performance on the following products will be gained:

• Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) which runs native Android apps in a VM with great Windows integration
• Azure Linux VMs and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) which each run Linux in VMs
• Microsoft Edge browser which is cross-platform and based on Chromium

If you want to take a closer look at this initiative and judge for yourself, make sure to check out the open-source project on GitHub.

Excited about this new set of tools? Let us know in the comments section below.