Besides being an all-around great browser, Microsoft Edge (recently updated to version 108) offers several advanced features not available on other browsers (at least not without third-party extensions). One such part is Sleeping Tabs—a unique tool for saving memory on your computer by putting inactive tabs to sleep without reloading them upon restoring. Microsoft has shared more details about how the feature makes memory consumption more efficient and how Edge is now better at figuring out when it should freeze tabs.
This is not the first time Microsoft is rightfully bragging about Sleeping tabs. In June 2022, the company revealed that Sleeping Tabs saved more than 273 Petabytes of RAM in just 28 days. Now Microsoft has new stats about this resource-saving feature: the company claims Edge put to sleep 1.38 billion tabs just in September 2022. There are no details about the exact amounts of saved RAM, but according to Microsoft, Sleeping Tabs helps Edge free up about 83% of the memory on average.
Besides putting to sleep tons of tabs you never close, Microsoft Edge is now slightly better at figuring out when it should intervene and put pages to sleep automatically. In Edge 105, Microsoft has changed its browser to sleep tabs without users' consent when their computers approach the memory limit. Of course, the feature still respects your exception lists and never freezes websites you have told the browser not to. You can customize Sleeping Tabs in Edge Settings > System and performance > Optimize Performance.
If you want to see how Edge compares to other browsers in terms of energy efficiency, check out our recent experiment proving Microsoft Edge is good at saving RAM and battery juice. These optimizations and resource-saving features help Microsoft Edge gain more users, as shown in Statcounter's latest report.
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