edge/chrome slow ?

Hey guy's
So I used to use IE for the longest time and then maybe I wanna say 4-5 years ago I discovered Chrome and it was blazing fast.

So recently (at home) I'm using an older win7 machine, I found I was getting the spinny wheel, on and off, so I did some diagnostics

1> Internet speed fine, blazing fast
2> NO malware no bulk software running

3>"although" I found that chrome had nearly 20 instances in the process's
I worked out how to stop them from running but found that didnt make any difference

3a> Cleared cache etx / and power settings are on high performance, nothing extra is running and everything is set to run as fast as possible.

THEN I thought about what was going slow, turns out just to be youtube, only when I run 720p or more.

I have netflix, but I have the SD package which only runs at 480, when I run youtube at 480 no problems

When I load up youtube also all the various icons screens takes ages at times

So then I downloaded Edge and .... Boom the problem stopped, I can run video's at 1080 youtube runs faster, BUT i hate edge, I prefer Chrome

What I don't understand, my home network I am directly connected to the router via Lan and get 100meg download (speednet) at work on the corp T1 with chrome no issues

Why is Edge at home running better than Chrome, is this some kinda MS conspiracy ?

Thoughts

BTW it's just STREAMING that's noticeably slow, anything else is fine

(running an i3,win7,8gig, ssd,direct LAN)

I do have newer machines and they do "not" seem to have issues, but I think they usually run Edge (daughters win11)

running chrome while doing this post

running 2 tabs, bimmerfest and youtube video on 480p (on chrome)

awesome txs will try !

I gave FF a try and yes it def seems less laggier, if I was to put them in order, it would be (slowest first) Chrome / Edge / Firefox

def at 720p it's coping, where chrome/edge seems to struggle (but fine at 480) all are a bit iffy at 1080p, so I think that's my machine, i3 8gig un-upgradegable any further
thats ok, at least I have some options

many thanks, at least thinks are making sense

I do have a 2nd machine a Dell inspiron 15 on win10, that is a bit more faster
I just love win7, too old skool to drop this puppy just yet

I'm in a similar boat and started my own thread (Win8.1, i3, 6GB). I was using CCleaner browser, which seems to be based on Chrome and it was driving me nuts, laggy and crashing my laptop, making disk usage @100%. I didn't want to go back to Chrome and Edge didn't seem any better. I already tried Opera and it was simlarly slow. K-Meleon sucked, couldn't even load any pages on it. I'm presently using Brave and it so far so good (disk usage really low, below 10%) even though it seems to be Chrome-based as well. However, if anyone has better options, I'm all ears.