As found by Ghacks, Microsoft is planning to introduce a new Sleeping Tabs feature in its Edge browser soon. This is available to try in the Edge Canary Version, which if enabled, sets the background inactive tabs to sleep mode. While it doesn’t completely kill the actively, it just freezes them to be wakened up later by clicking on them again. Microsoft notes this feature is to save the systems usage resources.
Edge Browser in Desktop to Get Sleeping Tabs Feature
Though Google’s Chrome is maintaining its market leadership, Microsoft’s Edge is fairly standing in the top five places. While it’s a long way for Edge to beat Chrome, Microsoft is making everything to attract users to its native browser. A latest known feature in accordance with this pursuit is the trailing of a Sleeping Tabs support.
Found by ghacks.net, this can be seen introduced in the Edge Canary version, which is a pre-beta phased mostly used by developers to check flaws and features in the browser before being rolled out to beta or final release.
This reveals the new Sleeping Tab feature, which freezes the background inactive tab to save up system resources.
The feature is clever enough to detect the site characteristics, to determine whether it has to be kept for sleeping or not. For example, tabs playing background audio/video or other background tasks will not be put to sleep.
The sleeping tabs will be colored grey to distinguish them apart and can be reactivated by clicking on them.
The feature will also let users customize working. Here’s how;
Enable the feature by typing “edge://flags” in the browser’s search bar.
Search “sleep“, which will return three flags.
- Enable Sleeping Tabs – The main preference. Set it to enabled to enable the sleep mode functionality in the browser.
- Enable immediate timeout for Sleeping Tabs – The optional setting bypasses the timeout setting to put background tabs into sleep mode immediately. If you don’t want background tabs to be disabled after a very short period, several seconds, keep it disabled.
- Sleeping Tabs use observed site characteristics heuristics – The optional setting enables heuristics to identify sites that should not be put to sleep mode, e.g. those with notifications or background tasks such as video or audio playback.
Restart the Edge web browser.
