April 11, 2022
Microsoft has introduced some features that will help to guarantee better performance when using its Microsoft Edge browser.
The features include sleeping tabs and a new dialog that shows users how much system memory is saved by the sleeping tabs feature.
“Beginning in Microsoft Edge 100, we have updated sleeping tabs to enable pages that are sharing a browsing instance with another page to now go to sleep. With this change, 8% more tabs on average will sleep, saving you even more resources! On average, each sleeping tab saves 85% of memory and 99% CPU for Microsoft Edge,” explained the Microsoft Edge team.
The “Sleeping Tabs” function automatically forces inactive background tabs to “fall asleep.” The feature frees system resources after a predefined time. By default, inactive tabs are put to sleep after two hours of inactivity.
However, users can change the time from the Settings page.
“Sleeping tabs build upon the core of Chromium’s ‘freezing’ technology. Freezing pauses a tab’s script timers to minimize resource usage. A sleeping tab resumes automatically when clicked, which is different than discarded tabs, which require the page to fully be reloaded,” Microsoft Senior Program Manager Eleanor Huynh said.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.
