How to Use Sleeping Tabs in Microsoft Edge?

Compared to Chrome, Microsoft Edge consumes less memory and CPU being a native browser in Windows OS. However, some people work with too many open tabs thus making the browser draining battery and use high system resources. To optimize this, Edge has an option called sleeping tabs. In this article, let’s see what is sleeping tab and how to use sleeping tabs in Microsoft Edge.

What are Sleeping Tabs?

In general, users focus on the current tab for longer time and navigate to other open tabs when needed. However, those inactive tabs also will run in the background and consume resources like CPU and memory. To avoid the inactive tabs using system resources, Edge introduced sleeping tabs from version 88 beta. When you have two or more open tabs, Edge will put the unused tabs in to sleep mode. This is something like making the tab inactive and not refreshing the content till the time you click the tab and activate it. In this way Edge can consume less CPU and memory and releases the resources occupied by the sleeping tabs for other processes running in the system.

• You can enable or disable the features in Edge settings page.
• You can setup the time duration for the tabs to go into sleeping mode.
• It is also possible add exception list to make certain sites always active and ignore they are going to sleep mode.

Enable Sleeping Tabs in Microsoft Edge

• Open Edge and press “Alt + F” keys or go to “Settings and more (three dots on top right corner).
• Select “Settings” from the list of menu items that appears.
• Go to “System and performance” from the left sidebar.
• Scroll down on the right pane and check under “Optimize Performance” section.
• Turn the switch on against “Save resources with sleeping mode” option.

Set Timer for Sleeping Tabs

Check the option “Put inactive tabs to sleep after the specified amount of time”. This option will be disabled for editing and set as 5 minutes of inactivity when you have enabled “Turn on efficiency mode”. You can disable the efficiency mode and set custom timer for sleeping tabs from the dropdown. The timer is available from 30 seconds to 12 hours of inactivity time and you can choose the one you prefer for enabling sleeping mode for tabs.

Fading Sleeping Tabs Options in Edge

In addition to setting up timer, you can enable “Fade sleeping tabs” option. This will dim the inactive tabs after set timer, so that you can understand they are in inactive mode from the browser’s title bar.

Hover over an inactive tab and you can find “this tab was discarded to save resources” message in its hover card.

Clicking on the faded tab will reload the page and show its content afresh.

Add Exception Site List

Sometimes, you want certain websites to be always active without going to sleeping mode. Perhaps you want to check live sports scorecard or listen to audio from an inactive tab. In such cases, you can’t add those sites as exception from the tab or title bar. You need to go edge://settings/system page and click the “Add” button showing against “Never put these sites to sleep” option. Type the site’s domain name (you can use wildcard for subdomains) and press “Add” button.

Final Remarks

Microsoft claims on their blog post that sleeping mode saves 32% of memory and 37% of CPU usage on average compared to old Edge versions. If you are always work with too many open tabs, make sure to enable sleeping mode feature in Edge settings. This will help Edge to avoid hogging your CPU and memory.