Discussion - Allow users to put individual tabs to sleep

MissyQ 

When managing tabs, I'm thinking of them more in terms of allocating scarce computer resources than a juggling web content (even though it's the content that's weighting my willingness to expend resources--i.e., make the sleep/wake decision). Fundamentally, I want to be able to get the energy (battery, heat/fan), CPU/GPU, and RAM resources (or at least as much as possible) back from Edge on-demand, without fully closing the application, windows, or tabs.

Your FAQ/Heuristics capture much of the use case for sleeping tabs. As another user mentioned, a more accurate request may be just putting a single tab to sleep, but for more granular control of a tab's (or window's) sleeping behavior without having to exclude a URL in Settings.

There may be a relatively resource-intensive tab that I want to sleep immediately; or another that I want to prevent from sleeping in a given use case but not universally to the extent that I exempt it in Settings. As web pages get more dynamic, they seem to be doing a lot more in the "background"--even if I've minimized Edge... at least according to their resource usage. I believe I've set my sleep threshold to 20 - 30 minutes, depending on the device's resources; but that may be too long if I'm switching to a resource-intensive application but still need to use just a specific web resource from Edge. (This gets more fun if using M365 apps through Edge.)

It doesn't help that I'm a tab and window "hoarder." I keep tabs for specific projects in their own windows and keep those windows open across sessions (another reason I'm not entirely thrilled with the friction of using History for cross-device open windows). There may be a "better" way to do it--collections, bookmark groups, etc.--but I believe software should "meet the user where they are" and not force us to adapt our workflows to a developer's way of working. 

My bottom line is less about individual tabs and more about all of the tabs in a particular window. There may be individual tabs in my "main" window that I'll want to sleep immediately while otherwise keeping that window awake; but mostly I need the ability to put pages to sleep immediately (most often when minimized).

Thanks for soliciting our feedback and I hope this helps.

-M