Microsoft Edge is rolling out a new feature — Sleeping Tabs — that puts inactive tabs to a type of hibernation. It promises to reduce memory consumption by 32 percent and help minimize CPU resources’ impact by a whopping 37 percent, which will also improve your battery performance. The Microsoft Edge team first talked about this feature in September, and this feature is now coming to the Beta version of the Edge browser.
Microsoft Edge rolls out Sleeping Tabs
Some Insider channels have been testing out this feature for a couple of months now. Microsoft says that it has taken their feedback into account while polishing the Beta release’s sleeping tabs feature. For instance, it has now included an option to create a sleeping tab after 5 minutes of inactivity.
The Edge interface can now quickly tell apart which tabs are sleeping and which are not. There are also some options to make a few system-level changes from the IT admins’ perspective. The developers say that they have also built the heuristics to prevent scenarios where sleeping tabs would tamper with the browser’s workflow.
According to Microsoft, sleeping tabs use the “freezing” technology from Chromium to bring down the CPU and memory resources. When a tab is freezing, its script timers are paused and unable to consume resources. However, as soon as the user clicks on a tab, it will come back to life.
“Although individual device performance varies depending on configuration and usage, we’ve heard from users that this decrease in resource and battery usage has improved their browsing experience,” Microsoft said.
Because this feature does not discard the tab completely, there is no need to reload the content. While adopting this feature to create the sleeping tabs option, Edge has set two hours as the default time for the ‘sleeping’ trigger, which is a bit too much. So, Edge also provides users with an option to modify the time limits as per their needs.
Sleeping Tabs making their way to the beta channel means that we could expect a public release in the coming months. It is not clear how much time Microsoft needs for adequately testing and analyzing the results, though. Given that people are now craving improved performance and battery life savings, this option will surely be popular.
