We keep a lot of tabs open in our browser because we want to switch back to those pages quickly. Unfortunately, we often forget to close them and those open tabs consume system resources and that can add up considerably. With the new Sleep Tabs feature in Edge, it is possible to save more than 25% on resources.
Step 1: Limit resource use
When you keep dozens of tabs open in Edge, it’s not uncommon for the browser to consume up to 1.5 GB of RAM. Sleep tabs is a new feature built in from Edge 88. The principle is simple … Edge assumes that if you haven’t activated a tab for a certain amount of time (for example, for two hours), that you have simply forgotten to close it. The function freezes the contents of the spreadsheet and stops all system power allocated to it. When you do click on this sleeping tab, it will automatically come back to life.
Third-party extensions already exist that do much the same thing, but Edge does this better because it doesn’t close the inactive tab, but pauses the state. It is a very useful feature and we recommend enabling it and configuring it properly. Click on the three dots in the top right corner to display the Settings to open. Then in the left pane of the screen, select the System item. In the right pane, click in the group Save resources on the slide at the back Limit resource usage with hibernation tabs. From now on the function is active.
Step 2: Specify duration
By default, Edge will put the tabs to sleep after two hours of inactivity. To change this, select a different time from the drop-down list next to Enable hibernation for inactive tabs after the specified amount of time. In this screen you can also capture websites that should never be put to sleep. To do this, click on the button Add and then type the domain name, for example computertotaal.nl, and finally click the button Add.
Step 3: Flags
Just like in Chrome, you can turn experimental functions on and off via the so-called flags. Then you will see a long list of options that you can activate. Type in the address box of the browser Edge: // flags and press Enter. Look for the option in this page Enable Sleeping Tabs. Next to it is a blue button Default. If you click on that, you set it to Enabled or Disabled.
