Microsoft Edge had the notoriety of havinghigh CPU and RAM usageafter some updates.

If several tabs were opened at the same time, the amount of memory required also increased.

Though it is based on theChromium project, it had its share of difficulties.

In 2021, a new feature called Sleeping tabs was introduced.

This will drastically reduce the amount of CPU and RAM usage.

Theadvantage with sleeping tabsis that they wake up when you click that particular tab.

On using the new feature, this can be reduced.

These resource savings should bevery helpful for laptop userswherebattery poweris important.

This feature pauses the tabs script timers to minimize CPU and RAM usage.

This is different from the discarded tabs feature where the tab completely goes to sleep.

When that tab is clicked, the page is to be reloaded completely.

The sleeping tabs feature makes the inactive background tabs to go to sleep.

This will release the computer resources after a set amount of time.

Sleeping Tabs

By default, the inactive tabs will go to sleep after two hours.

you’re able to even set a time as low as five minutes.

to get to know the difference between active and inactive tabs the sleeping tabs will show a fading color.

To resume the sleeping tab you just have to click it again and its back to normal.

This makes sure that those kinds of tabs always remain active.

This is useful when there are any background processes running for that particular site or tab.

Some of the sites may hang up on putting them to sleep automatically after a particular set of time.

If you want to leave any feedback on this feature in Edge, by pressingShift + Alt + I.

According to the latest version of this web client (88.0.705.63) this feature isautomatically enabled.

How to Enable Sleeping Tabs Manually ?

Microsoft Edge was completely closed initially.

Then it was opened with the start page as the home page.

When this was done, the amount of RAM usage was around 168MB and 2%CPU.

So this value was noted after sometime when it has become stable.

Later 13 tabs were opened.

Some other applications were also running Google Chrome, Microsoft Excel, Word, Notepad++.

After waiting for a small amount of time, the values were again noted.

This time theRAM usage was 2000MB and CPU was around 15 to 20%.

An interesting point to note is that CPU values fluctuated more than the RAM.

I have set thetime of inactivity in the sleeping tabssettings page to15 minutes.

After this particular time, I again noted down these values.

The RAM value was almost constant around1350MB.

CPU values fluctuated between5% to 15%.

Also some of the internet tool tabs didnt go to sleep.

For example, PCWorld, ComputerWorld, Intel and such kinds of sites.

This was about 37.5% decrease when compared to not using the sleeping tabs.

Since CPU value was varying greatly, it cannot be conclusively said that the decrease was perfect.

We need to use some kind of tool to measure the reduction.

It also shows that CPU resources were reduced by 40 to 50%.

This is also in-line with the development team findings of Microsoft Edge.

Also, I observed that the sleeping tabs were awake once we clicked on them.

This was instantaneous for many of the sites.

So as a conclusion we can say that this feature can be used safely.