Edit search generates (for "newest first") the ordering clause ORDER BY edit.open_time desc, edit.id desc. This means that the database, which does not know that open_time and edit ID are strongly correlated, has to retrieve all results before ordering them by open_time and choosing the first 25 - for all it knows, edit #123 might be more recent than edit #12345678 or edit #23456789.

If the results were ordered by ID alone, the output order would be almost the same, but the query would be processed much faster.