Forum Discussion
MissyQ
Microsoft
MicrosoftDiscussion - Allow users to put individual tabs to sleep
Hi Insiders, thanks so much for your feedback on the sleeping tabs experience in the new Microsoft Edge. From reading your comments, it is clear that many of you would like an easy way to put individual tabs to sleep. A couple examples we've heard include requests to right-click on a tab to put it to sleep or set a shorter timer than 5 minutes in Settings.
Top Feedback Item: Allow users to put individual tabs to sleep
As we investigate this feedback further, we'd like to ask for your help to make sure we are solving the right problem and get the experience just right. Can you provide us some examples of situations or sites where this would be helpful to you, and why? What are some struggles that you've had without this capability? Note that not all sites can go to sleep (some are prevented by our heuristics to help you stay on task and limit potential compatibility issues) - does this influence your perspective at all?
Thanks for your help, we look forward to working with you to improve the new Microsoft Edge in this area.
-The Microsoft Edge Team
MissyQ I too would like the option to manually put tabs to sleep. The 30 second timer is helpful but I find it insufficient. Moving between tabs and groups with any alacrity means many might stay awake and use resources even after they are no longer needed. Having the option to quickly right click and select put to sleep would be great. Further - and I understand that some sites cannot be put to sleep - I feel that sometimes, particularly with tab groups, the sleep function does not take effect when it should. I know this issue was addressed in November, but as there is no existing functionality to "Allow users to put individual tabs to sleep," I feel it needs to be addressed further.
Thank you
MissyQ sorry for posting on a dead thread but is there any chance that an extension api for sleeping tabs will be available. I would love to make an extension to organize misbehaving website (I'm looking at you amazon.com) and force them to sleep faster than other tabs
- MissyQ
TheProphetOfSoup No worries at all, friend! Solid question. I legitimately do not know the answer to this, but I reached out to the team to see if I can get an answer for you. In the meantime, would you mind hopping over to the new Feedback portal and posting this as a request? This is the best spot for feature suggestions, and I think your request would work well there. I can ensure the team knows that you have posted it up there if you let me know when you do. 🙂
I'll get back to you once I hear from them! Do not hesitate to poke me for an update if I don't come back with any news for too long, but just as an FYI December is Super Holiday Vacation Time(TM) at Microsoft so an answer may be slightly delayed. :3
Missy Quarry (she/they)
Community Manager - Microsoft Edge
Join us on Twitter, or over on Reddit in r/MicrosoftEdge or r/edge
- I myself would like to see just the opposite. When I'm researching something I will often be going back and forth between up to 4 tabs sometimes. The tabs going to sleep makes what I'm doing harder and takes more time.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. I have my tab sleeping set to as close as they allow to immediately as you can get and when I click one that is sleeping it wakes immediately fully functioning, so I'm not sure how you could be losing any time and how it is making what you do harder? Every morning I open a collection that has eight different tabs for eight different websites that I edit 7 days a week. I lose no time waking them as they sleep as I'm going between the eight tabs back and forth updating info on them. No time loss.
Dennis5mile
- Would the feature to manually choose which tabs we'd want to put to sleep not be feasible at the moment? I fear what the automatic "immediately" feature will do to tabs where (for example) I have long, still-playing videos.
- Alexandra-R
AhlieFS There are some specific tabs that won't be put to sleep based on what's occurring on them, there's a full list in the Sleeping Tabs FAQ but it does include tabs playing audio! You can also add sites you never want to sleep to a block list in Settings by going to edge://settings/system.
The manually choosing tabs bit is on the team's radar as a feature request, but please keep sharing reasons you'd like to see it and how you'd use it! 😃
- Alexandra-R
Hey Insiders! The team has added an option to the inactive tabs timer to put inactive tabs to sleep almost immediately. You can find it in settings in the latest Canary build!
Note that as Missy's post explains, some tabs won't be put to sleep based on heuristics.
Let us know what you think after you spend some time with this one!
- This is just as good as Immediately. Though I have to wonder why you cannot just add immediately to the list. But, Thanks for this addition.
Dennis5mile- Alexandra-RThat's actually a really good question, and I'm not just saying that because I have a really good answer! This is the shortest timer we're comfortable with offering to avoid site compatibility issues. The team understands that folks really want an immediate timer and got as close to that as they could without creating other issues that would make the setting less desirable or require a lot of exceptions!
- +1 for this. I do have the "Put inactive tabs to sleep" feature enabled, but I've noticed that it works somewhat intermittently. Maybe it's because of the site itself not allowing sleeping because of possible background processes, but I find that it's not always the case. I have 2 tabs from the same domain, literally next to each other that I haven't touched for hours, and 1 of them is asleep and the other isn't. So I'm hoping being able to manually put the tabs to sleep will do the trick.
The reason I need this feature is because I tend to need to regularly go back to certain tabs, or I just want them around so I remember that I NEED to come back to them eventually. Hoping to hear good news for this soon. 🙂 - MissyQ
Thanks everyone for taking the time to walk through this with us!
I've shared all this chatter with the Performance team, and they are working to address this when we can. If you submitted feedback to us via the browser about this and included your email, you should expect to see a similar update from us there. Please let us know of any other thoughts you have to share on the feature, and thank you again!
Missy Quarry (she/they)
Community Manager - Microsoft Edge
Join us on Twitter, or over on Reddit in r/MicrosoftEdge or r/edge- I misunderstood some of what was going on and I want to clear up my statement. I felt an amplified impact on my system resources. It turns out that i was using the experimental "workspaces" command line switch, and I hadn't figured out yet that this switch at the time was causing massive CPU usage.
I don't want that mistake to undercut my core concept, which is to default to 0% CPU availability to unfocused or un-seen tabs as the baseline, and then work backwards to only give pages resources when the USER needs it. 🙂 - Thank you for the update
I'm trying really hard to think of more than 5 use cases where it's useful to have web pages do anything that consumes ANY CPU when they're not in focus. Mostly my browser converts electricity into ads in windows I'm not looking at. For all the hours I leave my PC unattended, 80% of the electricity just goes right to edge which converts it into ads!
It feels like it's very silly that at the core, web pages can eat up cpu and gpu when they're NOT being used. I feel like, unless a web page is focused, the default should be a complete shut down of that tab, clip the available CPU to ZERO, and then we work backwards from there. We find rules that allow tabs to be "ON" instead of figuring out rules for turning the tabs OFF.
Here's my view from the ground floor, (and this is using the Dev channel so I know results may vary): I have 6 tabs open and visible right now and cpu usage of 20%, GPU usage of 30%, and 2.8GB ram used. Now, I do have 100 or so hidden (non-active) tabs (most of them are shown as "unloaded" in edge:\\discards) but I have to assume signals from those tabs are still eating resources. (last patch it was 8GB of RAM, so I appreciate the improvements!). It would be unimaginable if only 6 visible windows were doing that.
But why do we default to giving inactive pages the ability to do all of, lets face it, play ads while we're not focused on the page?- Normally, in my work, I need a lot of tabs. So normally I have to open a lot of tabs, even though lots of those are for later use. The tabs all use a lot of memory... I know that I can just set a short timer, but that doesn't necassarily work all the time: there can be some tabs that I'm currently using, just haven't clicked on for a while; it can be really annoying when tabs I'm still using go to sleep and I have to re-activate them again. Which is why I believe a option to put a tab to sleep in the right-click menu should be an option. It would make a lot of things easier for me!
Thanks! - I believe putting tabs into sleep is important when we want to save some resources. So let say I open multiple tabs and I need more resources to use but I don't want to wait for tabs to go to sleep and I just right click and place them into sleep (the tab I might not want).
In case it is in the vertical tabs, may be there would be an sleep tab icon at the top and click on it would should checkbox in all tabs and I select them and place want I want to sleep (it would be faster).
Another approach would like to see which tabs consume more resources and set Microsoft Edge to put tabs with high resource usage into sleep.
