• 25 September, 2020
• No Comments

Microsoft Edge’s New Feature Will Reduce Memory And CPU Usage

To improve memory and CPU usage in Edge, Microsoft is working on a new feature called “Sleeping Tabs”.

Sleeping Tabs feature is based on Chromium’s freezing technology that basically pauses a tab’s background activities (such as advertisements, javascript, script timers, etc) to minimize resource usage.

Unlike discarded tabs where your page is fully reloaded, a sleeping tab resumes with all its content when clicked.

According to Microsoft, sleeping tabs could improve memory usage by up to 26% for Microsoft Edge. Likewise, a sleeping tab also reduces CPU usage by up to 29%, which should also result in battery savings.

Also Read: Buying a Paper Shredder: 5 Important Factors to Consider

When you hover your mouse over a suspended tab, Edge will state “This tab is sleeping to save resources.”

Microsoft says individual device performance varies depending on a number of factors, including the configuration of their hardware and this feature.

Enable Sleeping Tabs experimental feature

1. Open Edge://flags
2. Enable “Enable Sleeping Tabs” and “Sleeping Tabs use observed site characteristics heuristics”
3. Relaunch Edge.
4. Open Settings > System.
5. Enable Sleeping Tabs.

By default, Microsoft plans to set tabs to go to sleep after two hours of inactivity, but advance users can choose a different time interval, as shown in the screenshot below:

To resume a frozen tab, simply click on it and your content will be restored without a full page reload.

You can also add important sites you never want to stop running to a block list in Settings.

Also Read: What Legislation Exists in Singapore Regarding Data Protection and Security?