Increased Speed Coming To Microsoft Edge With New Feature. In recent years, Microsoft has struggled to make a browser that could compete with the most popular offerings on the market today. Internet Explorer was the early standard but was quickly eclipsed and slowly fell into obscurity. Microsoft’s second attempt, Microsoft Edge, was short-lived and never had time to fully mature before Microsoft abandoned it and adopted a Chromium-based Edge, re-launching the product.
While Microsoft Edge’s latest incarnation still has some distance to go, Microsoft has been steadily improving the product. Recently, they’ve made another move similar to Google’s tab management changes.
In the case of Microsoft Chromium-based Edge, the changes put unused tabs to sleep, virtually eliminating the number of system resources they consume until you activate the tab by clicking onto it. It’s a simple change with profound implications. Sure enough, it increases the Microsoft Chromium-based Edge browser’s speed and overall performance while simultaneously boosting your device’s overall performance. That’s a win for you, the user, no matter how you slice it.
Sleeping Tabs
Microsoft’s Senior Program Manager, Eleanor Huynh, said, “Sleeping tabs builds 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 be fully reloaded.”
In all, Microsoft has found that the new feature reduces memory usage by an average of 32 percent, which is beyond impressive. If you’re interested in trying out the new feature, you can download Chromium Edge Beta, where you’ll have access to:
- An option to put tabs to sleep after 5 minutes of tab inactivity
- Group policies to manage sleeping tabs (IT admins only)
- An improved visual treatment that clearly shows which tabs are sleeping without distracting from the task at hand.
It’s a significant change, and if you’re a Microsoft Chromium Edge user, you should take it for a test drive.
