The overhead of Edge on Windows 11 (and 10)

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I noticed while looking at the WebView2 processes on Windows 11 that there was also a set of Edge processes running from the moment I logged in:

I understand why that happens — it’s a performance optimization, so that when you do actually launch Edge it’s ready to go (at the expense of some extra time/IO/memory consumed during the logon process). The feature is called “Startup boost” and it can be enabled and disabled in Edge’s system settings page:

If you turn that feature off and close all the open Edge windows, you’ll see all the msedge.exe processes disappear. Great, you have a choice.

But remember if you change the default browser from Edge to Chrome or any other browser, you’ll still have these Edge processes running in the background since that “Startup boost” is enabled by default regardless of your default browser.

You might think this is an appropriate policy for blocking this:

Sadly, no, that appears to be for the old (and no longer present) pre-Chromium Edge. A check of the documentation confirms that there is a setting available and is available in MSEdge.admx — which isn’t included in Windows 10 or 11 by default. So, to configure this policy you need to download and add the Chromium Edge ADMX files, which you can download from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/business/download then copy to the PolicyDefinitions folder (or to a central policy store, which I would generally recommend):

Now you can see the computer policy:

With that disabled, you won’t see Edge start up when you log in. (Heck, you don’t even have to log out, the policy takes effect right away — just close any open Edge windows and you’ll see all the Edge processes disappear.)