Sleeping Tabs feature comes to Edge: so you can make the browser use less RAM if you have multiple tabs active

One of the criticisms that have traditionally been made of Chrome refers to the excessive consumption of resources, especially when we have multiple tabs openThe RAM memory of our equipment flies and it is a problem that Google tries to correct or at least mitigate, with each update it releases for its browser.

With the arrival of Edge with the Chromium engine, we saw how many of the good things that Chrome has were inherited, but problems inherent to the platform have also arrived.The consumption of RAM, although not so exaggerated, is notable in Edge, which is why Microsoft has devised a system that lessens the impact on our equipmentwhen using different tabs simultaneously.

Sleeping Eyelashes

A problem, that of excessive consumption of resources, that will be fixed in the next update of Microsoft Edge and that can already be tested in the versions within the channels of development, more specifically in the Canal Canary version.

To avoid excessive consumption, Edge will freeze> that we are not using and will put them in a kind of hibernation or sleep mode with a function called Sleeping Tabs . It is an evolution of the freeze tabs function>"

This benefit is available for Edge on Windows 10 or macOS and helps reduce RAM usageA feature will automatically put inactive background tabs to sleep to save resources. When you revisit that tab, just clicking on it again will make it active again.

In addition, they have pointed out something fundamental and that is that the system will study what activity is being carried out in each tab so that if it plays audio or video in the background, the browser will not freeze or suspend that tab.

Steps to follow

We must have downloaded and installed the latest version of Edge within the Canary Channel. Now we are going to use the well-known menu flags>edge://flags."

Once inside, type Sleeping>Sleeping Tabs in the search box that opens at the top. We only have to mark the option in Enabled, since it is deactivated by default."

We must also check the option Sleeping Tabs use observed site characteristics heuristics, which determines that Edge does not close certain tabs in which certain activity is observed, such as background playback of video or audio or access to social networks."

Alongside these two options there is another call Enable immediate timeout for Sleeping Tabs which ignores any timeout and puts the eyelashes at rest immediately. With the options we want checked, all we have to do is restart Edge."

Once restarted and with the option Sleeping Tabs enabled we just have to go to Settings of Edge and in the left sidebar, within System, look at the section Save resourcesand mark the waiting time that must elapse before the tabs become inactive.We can choose periods of 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours and 6 hours."