The new Microsoft Edge shares an engine with Google Chrome, the most used browser. This offers Microsoft a series of advantages, thanks to which it has been able to create (finally) a browser to match with which, probably, it will end up hurting its rival, but it also inherits the main problems of this browser, such as it is the excessive consumption of RAM and CPU that, from always, has persecuted Chromium and the rest of browsers based on it. This has forced Microsoft to find a way to fix this problem. And the solution has been the new “performance mode” .
What is Edge performance mode
This new mode started working a couple of weeks ago to a very select and small group of users of the Canary version of the browser. With it, Microsoft intends to optimize Edge performance by reducing the use of RAM, CPU and battery without varying the user experience too much. To do this, what Microsoft is going to do is force the browser to erase the data from the memory of the tabs that have been inactive for more than 5 minutes, leaving them in a suspended state.
In addition to being very radical with tabs, this function will disable browser functions (such as animations) when we are not actively using it, freeing up even more memory. Of course, we must bear in mind that not everything is going to be advantages, and that is that, in exchange for the saving of RAM, some functions (such as the visualization of streaming videos) might not go entirely well.
Of course, this mode will be optional, and as soon as it is available to all users we can activate or deactivate it from the browser’s own settings.
This feature is still in the experimental phase, so it is not available to all users, not even within the Canary branch. But, with a little trick, we can enable it and start using it right away. And, as we have seen, there is a considerable improvement in resources, consuming practically half the RAM compared to the stable version.
Enable this experimental feature in Edge Canary
The first thing we must do to be able to test this function is to install the Canary branch of the Microsoft browser on our computer. We can download it for free from the following link , and it will be installed together with the stable version, so we will not have to give it up in order to try this trial version.
The new Edge performance mode is under a hidden experimental flag, so we cannot activate it from edge: // flags, but we will have to do it from the direct access to the browser. To do this, we locate this shortcut, open its properties (by right-clicking) and add, in the “Destination” section, the following:
--enable-features=msPerformanceModeToggle
Now, when opening the browser from this shortcut, within the Configuration> System section we will find this option. We can activate or deactivate it according to the use that we are going to make of the browser so that it works better or worse. And, if we want to return to normal mode, we only have to remove said parameter from the shortcut, or create a new one.
