Microsoft has recently announced several new features for Edge Stable from its Beta insider channel. The features include Startup boost, sleeping tabs, vertical tabs, and a friendlier History dialogue.
Microsoft also announced some welcome interface modifications to Bing – which the company insists on labelling as Edge features. Still, the items appear to apply equally to bing in any browser thus far.
Edge’s startup boost is impressive. Instead of shutting down al processes when you close the browser, it keeps a minimal set up and running. Microsoft claims that those always-on background processes decrease Edge launch times by 29% to 41%.
The company claimed that the background processes have an insignificant impact on memory and CPU as a whole.
The new feature can be disabled by going to edge://settings/system -> Continue running background apps when Microsoft Edge is closed.
The sleeping tabs feature puts tabs to sleep, a lot like Chromium’s “tab freezing” feature.
After two hours of background status without interaction, the tabs get put to sleep to save memory and CPU usage. You can also tinker with that period and adjust it to your liking.
The tabs that are put to sleep have a faded appearance in the tab bar. Clicking on a sleeping tab will wake it up and bring it back into the foreground. However, there is currently no option to put a tab to sleep yet manually.
Vertical tabs were also added, finally.
They aim to maximize work efficiency because most displays typically have nearly twice as much horizontal screen than vertical.
Edge isn’t the first app to introduce that. Ubuntu started using a vertical application launcher nearly ten years ago.
