One of the main problems of today’s web browsers is the consumption of RAM and CPU. The web browser, just by opening it, already consumes a good amount of megabytes of memory. And as we open several tabs at the same time to navigate, consumption skyrockets. Google, Mozilla and Microsoft, those responsible for the three main browsers, are constantly working to reduce this crazy consumption of resources to the maximum. And the next to mark a before and after in this sense is the new Edge, Microsoft’s browser, which launches its ” Sleeping Tabs “.
Sleeping Tabs helps us save RAM and CPU
Sleeping Tabs is a new feature that is coming to Edge very soon that, as its name suggests, will allow us to sleep the tabs that we are not using to free up its resources. Even if we have dozens of tabs open at the same time, we often only work with two or three, so having the rest loaded is totally unnecessary. What this new function is going to do is precisely free up all these unnecessarily used resources.
According to tests carried out by Microsoft, it is estimated that, thanks to this change, memory use is reduced by 32%, as well as CPU use by 37% . In a session with an average usage of 1700 MB of RAM occupied, Sleeping Tabs can leave you at just over 1100 MB of RAM. And the same goes for the CPU, which goes from 1.22% usage to 0.77%.
Edge is able to put the tabs to sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity. When a tab is suspended, we can easily tell by looking at its icon. In addition, it has a heuristic system that will analyze the web and, if it can cause problems when suspending, it will not do it directly.
Without a doubt, a huge improvement that, for now, is only available to Edge beta and Canary users. But it is not the only change we have seen recently.
Other news that we will see soon in Edge
Microsoft is working to bring us a lot of new features and improvements to the browser very soon. One of them, for example, are the groups of eyelashes in the purest Chromium style . This function will allow us to group the tabs into customizable groups to improve our productivity. Of course, in order to use it we will have to enter the Edge flags and manually activate those related to “tab-groups”.
Microsoft has also worked to create a new floating panel with browsing history . From it we will be able to see the history, and return to any page visited with a click, in addition to being able to have the recently closed tabs at hand to recover them in case of closing them by mistake. The PDF viewer has also been improved, being one of the best alternatives we have today to open these documents.
Lastly, the new Edge is now capable of detecting measured connections and blocking automatic downloads through them. This will help us save data if we are connected to this type of connection, avoiding surprises at the end of the billing period.
These news, for now, are only available to users of the Canary, Beta and Dev versions. Little by little, as they become stable enough, they will reach the stable branches so that all users can enjoy them , although there are no specific dates or versions of when this will occur.