Sleeping Tabs feature in Microsoft Edge can greatly save memory usage
Some time ago, Microsoft engineers submitted new codes to the Chromium project. These codes belong to the Sleeping Tabs related functions to save memory and power.
The so-called Sleeping Tabs is similar to the frozen tabs introduced by Google Chrome. In essence, it freezes inactive tabs and releases the resources they occupy.
Under normal circumstances, each page uses a separate process to occupy memory and processor resources, so if the user opens a lot of pages, the occupancy is very high.
The focus of the Chromium browser is to improve page loading speed and web page performance, so it does take up more resources and is often complained about by users.
At present, this feature has arrived in the beta version of the Microsoft Edge browser. Users need to turn on the corresponding experimental option to experience the latest features brought by Microsoft.
As mentioned above, this function essentially freezes the tab page to release resources, so the page will consume resources again when it needs to be restored but does not need to be re-rendered.
According to Microsoft’s test, this mechanism can save memory and processor resources on desktop computers. This feature can save power on laptop computers.
Microsoft said that “Using sleeping tabs on Microsoft Edge typically reduces memory usage by 32% on average. It also increases your battery life as a sleeping tab uses 37% less CPU on average than a non-sleeping tab.”
It is worth noting that Microsoft emphasizes that if the browser background page is playing video or audio, the browser will not freeze the page to prevent it from affecting the use.
This is actually not just audio and video content, but if the background page is processing certain tasks, such as downloading files or uploading files, it will not sleep.
Because if you sleep and then reload a tab, the page content may be lost and affect the user’s work. Considering this, the active background page will not freeze.
Users who use the beta version of the Microsoft browser can enable related options in the browser settings, system, save resources, and save resources using the sleeping tab.
