Like most people who pay attention to such things, the idea of using a MS browser after all the suffering they caused us with IE4-9 is a hard sell, but I've been toying with it a bit.
It does some things that will remind you of MS of old, like trying really hard to take over, opening Cortana links or Windows settings links in Edge no matter what you set as your default browser (at least this seems to be the case on Win10) and importing data from other browsers whether you want it to or not (it imports no matter what and then discards if you say not to import).
https://9to5google.com/2020/06/29/microsoft-edge-chrome-firefox-import-permission/
It has some interesting thing like vertical tabs, which I haven't seen in a browser in years. Disorienting at first, but a lot more readable if you have a lot tabs open.
https://9to5google.com/2020/10/28/microsoft-edge-vertical-tab-ui-design/
But the one thing that I find intriguing is the sleeping tabs. I find with every browser that if you have a lot of tabs open, eventually it gobbles up your memory and CPU and fires your fan up to high to handle the increased temperature. I'm always shocked to look in the task manager and see at least a dozen more processes than I have open tabs, all eating memory and CPU.
Edge has a "sleeping tabs" feature where you can set it to sleep tabs after 5-120 minutes of inactivity. So it doesn't reduce the number of processes, but it should reduce the load they cause.
QuoteUsing 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.
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/12/09/sleeping-tabs-beta-performance/
Do any other browsers have this? Do they do it better? I get that you're going to keep a fair bit in memory, but it seems like you could do better on the CPU end.
>Do any other browsers have this? Do they do it better?
I came across this:
https://www.techradar.com/news/chromes-new-feature-will-stop-tabs-from-eating-all-your-ram-heres-how-to-try-it
I have an extension on FF that does the same thing, but it seems to no longer be available. I found another extension that seem to work in a very similar way.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/
Interesting. It looks like on Chrome and one other Chromium browser I checked, that flag is no longer available. There's a flag to freeze tabs in a tab group when the tab group is collapsed.
I think tab "discard" and tab "sleep" is different, at least in the Chromium world.
QuoteYou can test it out to see the difference yourself. For example, if you launch YouTube and start playing a video, clicking "Freeze" for that tab will pause the video playback but not remove the YouTube tab's contents from memory in the Task Manager. Clicking "Discard" instead will pause video playback and remove the tab's contents from memory—you'll see it vanish if you open Chrome's Task Manager. Clicking "Load" will reload the tab's contents to memory.
https://www.howtogeek.com/444481/how-chromes-tab-freezing-will-save-cpu-and-battery/
You can see your discards at
chrome://discards/
But now it only has a single option: "Urgent discard"
If you discard, the tab stays there in your set of tabs, but when you open that tab again, it's blank and the page reloads, albeit quickly because it doesn't clear cached files, it just clears memory.
Interesting thing to know about for when the browser is eating all your resources.
>Do any other browsers have this? Do they do it better?
Vivaldi browser prides itself on it's tab management. You can have tabs running up the side, top, bottom. You can stack tabs, tile tabs for splitscreen view.
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/#tabs
This just for tab stacks.
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-stacks/
You can hibernate tabs so they don't use system resources.
Here's a quick overview of tab features:
https://vivaldi.com/blog/tab-management-tricks-vivaldi/
>>Vivaldi
Ah. Never tried it. Another Chromium browser. I wonder if Google will one day regret making the Chromium code open source.