Forum Discussion
MicrosoftIntroducing Sleeping Tabs Experiment: Improving Memory Usage in Microsoft Edge
Note: We are in the process of deploying this feature, so it may be a little while before you see it in your respective channel and build.
To improve memory and CPU utilization of the browser, we've developed a feature called sleeping tabs.
Early internal testing of devices with sleeping tabs has shown a median memory usage reduction of 26% for Microsoft Edge. Our internal testing has also shown that a normal background tab uses 29% more CPU for Microsoft Edge than a sleeping tab. These resource savings should result in excellent battery savings. Although individual device performance varies depending on configuration and usage, we expect the decrease in resource and battery usage to create a better browsing experience for users.
Median memory usage of Microsoft Edge based on performance data aggregated across ~13000 devices
Average CPU usage of Microsoft Edge based on performance data aggregated across ~13000 devices
Sleeping tabs builds upon the core of Chromium’s “freezing” technology. Freezing pauses a tab’s script timers to minimize resource usage. A sleeping tab resumes automatically when clicked, which is different than discarded tabs, which require the page to fully be reloaded.
We built upon the freezing technology to create sleeping tabs. This feature allows inactive background tabs to “go to sleep,” releasing system resources after a set amount of time. These resources include both memory and CPU and can be used for new or existing tabs or other applications running on your device.
By default, we’ve set tabs to go to sleep after two hours of inactivity. If two hours isn’t right for you, you can choose a different time interval in edge://settings/system. Tabs that are asleep will fade to let you know they’ve released resources. To resume a sleeping tab, click on it like a normal tab. The tab will un-fade and your content will be there immediately. You can also add sites you never want to sleep to a block list in Settings.
With this technology, it is possible that some sites may not work as expected after they go to sleep. We have built heuristics to detect these scenarios and prevent those tabs from sleeping to keep you in your flow. We are eager to get your feedback on sleeping tabs. If you experience a compat issue, please refresh the page and let us know through Microsoft Edge by pressing Shift+Alt+I on a Windows device or going to Settings and more … > Help and feedback > Send feedback.
Sleeping tabs will be coming soon to Canary and Dev Channels [87.0.649.0]. If you see the sleeping tabs feature while browsing, please join us here on the Microsoft Edge Insider forums or Twitter to discuss your experience, or send us your feedback through the browser! If you have any questions, see our FAQ or reach out to us. We hope you enjoy this exciting new feature and look forward to hearing from you!
- The Microsoft Edge Product Team
214 Replies
Okay buddy, lets not get our hopes up, I specifically configured that the tabs go to sleep after 30min and exclude YouTube from this, I don't want YouTube videos to be faded out, however it didn't respect the configuration and keeps on putting them to sleep approximately in 15min and YouTube along them
The selection "Immediately" should be one of the choices in your list, without having to go to a flag "Enable immediate timeout for sleeping tabs" to get it.
Dennis5milePlease give us option to protect our tabs from discarding in the same way as we now have the option to protect our tabs from sleeping trough the setting "Never put these sites to sleep". I strongly need to list my tabs running on localhost to never be discarded. Please introduce a new setting to "Never DISCARD these sites". It will bring back the browser to be trustworthy for 24/7 monitoring even if we using web browser for alarm monitioring and want to read the news when there is no alarms sounding.
Please put this request on the most urgent todo list.
- Spoiler
sungtroll wrote:Please give us option to protect our tabs from discarding in the same way as we now have the option to protect our tabs from sleeping trough the setting "Never put these sites to sleep". I strongly need to list my tabs running on localhost to never be discarded. Please introduce a new setting to "Never DISCARD these sites". It will bring back the browser to be trustworthy for 24/7 monitoring even if we using web browser for alarm monitioring and want to read the news when there is no alarms sounding.
Please put this request on the most urgent todo list.
define discarding.
the only feature that temporarily puts tabs to sleep is sleeping tabs in Edge, without it, tabs work forever as long as your computer is on.
see my previous posts if you dont understand. Your answer is absolutely wrong!. I made this picture to explain it to you "with a spoon". There you have the proof!. If you still dont get it then please dont bother to reply to my posts. It is unbelieveable that someone ever came up with the idea of saving resources by killing important tabs the user need to run 24/7 365 days a year!
The sleeping tabs is a great improvement with the possibillity to prevent tabs from sleeping and i love to put all my tabs to sleep immediately. But the crazy unloading by urgent discard is the worst nightmare ever in my 25 years of using computers making my computer extremly unreliable! So it need to be fixed urgent at high priority now that i have explained why!
Does it help to post anything in this thread? Does the people in charge of Edge development ever read this thread?
Thank you very much.
Amazing how a simple change has a huge effect. The change is noticeable. Very good. Congratulations!
@Eleanor_Huyn I really love this feature, but I would like to access it by a shortcut, so I can sleep tabs I am not using without having to wait that the browser does it. Also, I would like that the tab only awakes again when I press the shortcut, so even if I enter to the tab, it stays slept
Hi,
there is a way to put your tabs to sleep on demand,
I've explained it in this post, here is direct link to my comment which also has video demo:
I strongly agree and i also really like to be able to enter the sleeping tabs without waking them up. I usually have 20-30 tabs open that i use for references to my work and it is really no need to wake them up again and refresh the page to view the information. This will really help save internet cost for mobile broadband users and if internet is down there is still possible to view the page without the information disappears when the browser try to refresh the page but the computer is offline. That happens to me almost every day. Freeze my tabs forever function will really be the biggest progress in internet browsers for a long time instead of bookmarks that need to load the page and the hassle to find the bookmark. So Microsoft please do it immediately!
Thank you yuriasky for bringing this great idea up!
- hi after enable sleeping tabs , it seems it doen't work because none of tabs turned gray and there is no "this tab is sleeping" pop up in my tabs
Hamidreza20 wrote:
hi after enable sleeping tabs , it seems it doen't work because none of tabs turned gray and there is no "this tab is sleeping" pop up in my tabsWhat does your timeout setting look like?
edge://settings/system
if you want to dig deeper, you can also view why a tab can't go to sleep by going here: edge://discards/
and in the "can't sleep?" column, you can view the reasons if you hover over them.
HotCakeX thanks alot for guide, i put 5 min inactivity timeout , and " in Can Sleep?" column , it says "tab is currently holding an indexedDB lock" , how can i solve this? and is "sleeping tab" feature in edge as useful as great suspender?
harihelpsEleanor_Huynh this is a great feature! Thank you 🙂
