If you're sick of sacrificing your computer's hardware for the sake of your browser tabs, Microsoft may just have the solution for you. The software giant has moved its sleeping tabs feature over to Microsoft Edge Beta 88 and has some promising numbers to share with everyone.

What's Happening With Microsoft Edge's Sleeping Tabs?

This feature isn't particularly news to us. We first saw this feature surface during Microsoft's initial sleeping tabs test back in September 2020.

Microsoft's proposal for this new feature was simple. When a user didn't look at a tab for a certain period of time, Microsoft Edge would "put it to sleep" so that it didn't take up the computer's resources.

While the feature sounded promising, not much else could be said about it except for some in-house preliminary statistics. Now that the sleeping tabs have had a chance to shine in the Canary and Dev builds, Microsoft has refined them further and publish some more concrete statistics.

The company had this to say about its new feature on Windows Blogs:

Using sleeping tabs on Microsoft Edge typically reduces memory usage by 32% on average. It also increases your battery life as a sleeping tab uses 37% less CPU on average than a non-sleeping tab. Although individual device performance varies depending on configuration and usage, we’ve heard from users that this decrease in resource and battery usage has improved their browsing experience.

Since the feature came out on the development branches, Microsoft has added a few more touches to it. Now you can tell Edge to put tabs to sleep after five minutes of no use, and you can now easily see which tabs are currently asleep.

Microsoft is also working on special heuristics to detect if a page should be put to sleep or not. The act of putting a tab in stasis isn't always beneficial and has a tendency to break websites that depend on real-time processes.

As such, Microsoft wants to iron out the bumps and identify which tabs can be put to sleep. If the system detects that a specific tab won't take kindly to being put in stasis, it will not put it to sleep.

Don't Sleep on Microsoft Edge

With Microsoft Edge's new sleeping tabs feature, you can potentially save on a lot of your computer's resources. Just hop on the Microsoft Edge Dev branch and wait for version 88 to download to give it a try.

If you haven't been taking note of Microsoft Edge lately, now is a good time to do so. Recently, the browser received a bumper package of updates that make it a wonderful choice for productivity purposes.

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