The most popular browsers continue to try and get us to switch with impressive new features, and Microsoft is the latest to entice us with a new “Performance mode” for Edge.
As The Verge reports, currently Performance mode is still in development, but in a post on the Microsoft Tech Community website, the first details of what it actually does have appeared. There isn’t too much information about this new mode yet, but it’s described as helping to “optimize speed, responsiveness, memory, CPU and battery usage.”
It sounds as though Performance mode will be of most use when a user has one browser tab they wish to focus on and be as performant as possible. A side effect of turning the mode on is “sleeping tabs timer becomes unavailable.” Sleeping tabs were introduced earlier this year and allowed resources being used by background tabs to be released to improve overall performance. Microsoft says sleeping tabs can reduce memory usage by 32% and CPU usage by 37%.
The timer for the sleeping tabs feature is used to put inactive tabs to sleep after a set amount of time. It’s not made clear why the timer being unavailable helps performance, but I’d guess it allows Microsoft to override any set timers and force all background tabs to immediately go to sleep and free up the most resources for your active tab.
If you want to try out Performance mode, you’ll need to install Edge canary Version 91.0.856.0 (Official build) canary (64-bit) or later. It shouldn’t take long for benchmarks to start appearing so we can get an idea of the performance difference this new mode makes.
