Edge and its “SLEEPING TABS”

Microsoft Edge is all set with its new feature known as “SLEEPING TABS” , focusing on reducing memory usage and CPU usage. This feature is typically based on CHROMIUM’s FREEZING technology which freeze a tab’s background activities like advertisements, java script, script timers, etc to minimize resource usage. Microsoft claims that, sleeping tabs improves memory usage by up to 26% for Microsoft Edge and also reduces CPU usage by up to 29%, which results in battery savings and individual device performance varies depending on a number of factors, including the configuration of their hardware and this feature.

By enabling this feature, the other tabs which are currently not in use will be in sleep mode which cancel all the background activities even without discarding the tab. When we click on a tab which is in sleep mode, it will fully reload and resumes all the contents. When you place the mouse pointer over these tabs, it will show “This tab is sleeping to save resources.”

STEPS TO 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.

As of now, Microsoft is planning to set a 2 hour time out as default for sleeping the tabs. But users can customize this as per their needs. And to resume frozen tabs we can simply click on the tab again to reload. In addition to that, if we want to add any exception to not block the background activity of a website(in a particular tab), we can add that to a block list in Settings.