Introducing Sleeping Tabs Experiment: Improving Memory Usage in Microsoft Edge

[Eleanor_Huynh]

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.

gif of several tabs open, with one fading to sleep, and 7 other tabs also fading

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

[#2]

@yuriasky 

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!

[#3]

@vivik 

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@vivik wrote:

@HotCakeX I don't know if you understood my concern. Tried doing that but obviously it won't change anything.. I need sleep tabs to immediately have affect on every opened tabs without any delay or time-out as it used to be before the update came.

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That happens on my systems already, Edge stable and Edge canary.

please remember these two things:

you can go here: edge://discards/

and it shows you info about sleeping tabs features. there is a column called "can sleep?"

and if a tab can't sleep, you will see reasons for it if you hover over the entries.

common reasons are: 1)tab is added as an exception in Edge settings to never sleep. 2) tab is holding indexDB, 3)tab has notifications enabled

there can be more reasons, Edge is smart enough not to break website functionalities that's why it watches website behavior because making decision whether to put it to sleep or not.

to get immediate tab sleeping, you can turn on this flag:

edge://flags/#edge-sleeping-tabs-immediate-timeout

and then you will see here that it's set to immediately instead of custom timeout number

edge://settings/system

with these 2 pieces of info, if you still can't do this, then something is wrong on your side.

you can begin troubleshooting steps such as reinstalling Edge, resetting Edge from settings, resetting flags, extensions etc.

[#4]

@Hamidreza20 

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@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 tabs

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What 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.

[#5]

@yuriasky 

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:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/great-new-features-tabs-groups-auto-create-tab-gr...

[#6]

@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?

[#7]

Deleted 

[#8]

The setting edge://flags/#automatic-tab-discarding is missing from both edge standard and beta.

[#9]

@sungtroll 

Today i was lucky to find an extention to disable the terrible funktion that makes Chrome and edge totally unrialable to display critical running webpages always in the background. Finally. thanks to this thread, i was able to find the fault by the edge://discards/

The only way to solve the problem now is to use an extention to bring the browser back to be reliable for us that need it to be reliable for critical running applications.

Https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-automatic-tab-dis/dnhngfnfolbmhgealdpolmhimnoliiok...

Sorry that i blamed the sleeping tabs to be the cause of the problem. The problem seems to be from chrome all the way back to 2015 when they introduced the tab discarding experiment: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/09/tab-discarding

The solution did not need any extention, it is just to toggle the Auto discard setting in edge://discards/

Now i know. Please inform the world about this, the people deserves to know about this solution to make edge reliable for critical running applications!

[#10]

Deleted

[#11]

@Hamidreza20 

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@Hamidreza20 wrote:

@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?

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you're welcome,

great suspender was identified as malware and removed from extension stores.

sleeping tabs in Edge is better than that, yes.

you can't solve it, it's the website that has that behavior. like I said, Edge sleeping tabs is smart not to break website functionality. 

[#12]

@sungtroll 

Not sure why you are spamming the thread with lots of comments, replying to yourself repeatedly, while you can put them all in 1.

[#13]

@sungtroll 

Tab discarding flag is removed because no longer necessary, flags are not features, only temporary code in browser that can be removed any time and they do expire.

I already explained above what to do to take care of your problem.

[#14]

@HotCakeX 

thanks , there is extension "marvelous suspender" alternative for TGS that it says exactly same but  without malware, and some youtube or twitter pages go to sleep but some pages don't , and i can't find why because no audio or video isn't playing in those pages

[#15]

@HotCakeX 

sorry, i have no option to edit my posts and my post is by work in progress.

You was wrong when you said the sleeping tabs excemption list has always been there, it was not and even after updating to latest build. It is only in edge beta.

And work in progress discovered that sleeping tabs was not the problem but discarded tabs that was the problem from the beginning. You never suggested to check if the problem came from auto discarding tabs. It was just luck that i discovered that today after i followed the link seen here to edge://discards.

So if you want to help to make edge reliable for running critical apps in background please show me the link to discarded exception list for permanently making my critical tabs to stay awake forever even if in background without having to install extention to do the job.

I found the edit button now, but the delete button is there only on my latest post. Better to delete all the posts and mention the solution of discarding tabs problem in just one post.

[#16]

Amazing how a simple change has a huge effect. The change is noticeable. Very good. Congratulations!

[#17]

@Hamidreza20 

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@Hamidreza20 wrote:

@HotCakeX 

thanks , there is extension "marvelous suspender" alternative for TGS that it says exactly same but  without malware, and some youtube or twitter pages go to sleep but some pages don't , and i can't find why because no audio or video isn't playing in those pages

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well you can ask that extension's developer since your problem is related to it.

after the recent incidents, I personally don't trust 3rd party extensions so much.

[#18]

@HotCakeX yes that's right , do you know why some youtube or twitter pages go to sleep but some pages don't?

[#19]

@Hamidreza20 

edge://discards/ should tell you why,

i assume it's because of the content visible in each tab

[#20]

rodriantos@hotmail.com@Dennis5mile 

[#21]

@Eleanor_Huynh 

 Thank you very much.