Hide Microsoft Edge with tabs when idle, tab previews with selections, and more

The Edge team has been working on the function of putting tabs to sleep if they have not been used for a certain period of time.

How to control Microsoft Edge tabs in idle mode via edge://discards

With Microsoft Edge 89, the stable version also got the function of sending tabs to sleep. If you have activated it under Settings => System, you can choose between 5 minutes and 12 hours from when the tabs go into sleep mode.

In addition to the time, you can also exclude individual websites from sleep mode. Certainly very interesting for laptops to save the battery when you are on the go. The open tabs can also be controlled temporarily via edge://discards. There the open tabs are displayed and you have the option to send a tab directly to sleep mode, or to prevent a tab from being idle using the "toggle function" under "Auto Discardable".

Under Action, you can put a tab to sleep or force it to reload. If an X is displayed under “Can't Sleep?”, This tab is either open or cannot be put to sleep.

For those who want to use this function more often, the "Auto Tab Discard" extension may be of great interest. Here you can comfortably control the tabs using the icon next to the address bar. This extension is also available for Firefox and the other Chromium browsers.

A new function has now been added to the Canary in the Settings => System, which makes it possible to hide the "sleeping" tabs. Hiding here means that the website icon in the tab is displayed faded. Not so noticeable at first. But once you notice it, you can quickly see the difference.

A change has also been made to the pop-up menus (download, history, favorites). For example, if you call up the favorites, the name Favorites is also displayed in the top left. This can now be clicked in the (current) Canary and the page with the favorites will be opened. So you save yourself the way via the 3-point menu.

In addition, the tab preview with images in the Canary and Dev has now also made a selection available instead of just Enable / Disable. You now also have the option "Enable capture speed" (faster preview), "Enable resource usage" (use available resources).

As always, these functions will gradually be integrated into the beta or final version.