Jul 13 2021 08:32 AM
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
Jul 13 2021 09:01 AM
Jul 14 2021 01:50 PM
Jul 14 2021 07:20 PM
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
Jul 15 2021 01:35 AM
Jul 15 2021 06:15 AM
Jul 15 2021 08:58 AM
Jul 15 2021 01:36 PM
Jul 16 2021 10:30 PM - edited Jul 16 2021 10:54 PM
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?
Jul 23 2021 03:00 PM
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
Jul 24 2021 07:28 AM
Jul 30 2021 06:34 PM
Aug 04 2021 10:47 AM
Aug 04 2021 01:18 PM
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!
Aug 05 2021 02:24 AM
Aug 05 2021 08:39 AM
Aug 05 2021 10:15 AM - edited Aug 05 2021 10:16 AM
I am curious though, when this was first offered for canary, I used "immediately all the time and I found no trouble at all as I had reported on the article page that was started for it Sleeping tabs blog . So I am curious as to what issues happened with the immediately being set?
Dennis5mile
Aug 05 2021 10:23 AM
Aug 05 2021 11:53 AM - edited Aug 05 2021 12:01 PM
lol, Is that like calling a mule a horse, because it is almost a horse.. lol Thanks for the explanation.. lol..
Dennis5mile
Aug 06 2021 03:31 PM