Forum Discussion
Discussion - 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
26 Replies
- Ok, I know broken record here, but;Sleeping Tabs;
Ok, so this new "Optimize Performance mode" is all well and good, but I would still love the have "Immediately" as a choice. I open lots of tabs all at once every day, and having to wait even 5 minutes can be a drag. Especially when I load several Facebook pages at the same time Facebook is a hug resource hog and sometimes crashes the browser because of it. Please, I don't know what it will hurt, or why this seems to be a problem but can you add "immediately" as a choice in your selections list of times?Thanks
Dennis5mile 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
- If we're sure we won't be opening another tab for a long time, it might be really nice to put that tab to sleep instantly. For one tab, this doesn't make much difference in terms of savings, but for 15-20 tabs (which I usually have that many tabs open), it can save much more battery (compared to 5 minutes timer). 5 minutes * 15 tabs makes really more saving(I mean I guess...) I encounter this situation frequently. So personally I would definitely be very happy to have this feature.
- Yes: there was a flag to force immediate tab suspension in DEV, but it was removed in a recent version, limiting the minimum delay setting to 5 minutes. With a large number of tabs in multiple windows, I would prefer to have them suspended ASAP - especially when opening the browser. With lots of tabs open (e.g. 1000 or more), the interactions between Edge and Windows Explorer often cause Explorer to crash when the browser is opened - I need to disable tab previews and individual tab listings in the taskbar and ALT-TAB open app displays, but I still see issues when the processors are pinned at 100% for too long when Edge is opened. The less tab processing on browser startup, the better.
- I don't usually put individual tabs to sleep. Whenever I want to manually put tabs to sleep, it is usually to put all background tabs to sleep (either in the current window, or all windows). Whenever I am focused on a particular task, I don't want background tabs using memory. Having a quick command (button, menu item, or shortcut key) to accomplish this would be fantastic.
Some common commands from extensions include: suspend this tab, suspend background tabs in this window, suspend all background tabs, suspend tabs to the right/left
