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.
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
- Open Edge://flags
- Enable “Enable Sleeping Tabs” and “Sleeping Tabs use observed site characteristics heuristics”
- Relaunch Edge.
- Open Settings > System.
- 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.