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Note that you only see the options if you enabled the main Tab Sleeping experiment on edge://flags. Just load edge://settings/system in the address bar to access the configuration options under "Save resources". You can change the time period and add sites to an exclusions list to prevent them from ever being put to sleep. Hovering over a tab displays a confirmation as well that a tab is sleeping.Įdge puts tabs to sleep after 2 hours of inactivity by default. The browser paints tabs that are sleeping in a lighter gray text color to provide users with a visual indicator. Tab Sleeping needs to be enabled before the feature becomes available, and it supports an additional option to put background tabs into sleep mode immediately.
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It is not enabled by default, however, and needs to be enabled on about:config by changing the state of the preference to TRUE. The feature offers no user controls and the freezing happens automatically in the background after 5 minutes of inactivity.įirefox supports an automatic tab discarding feature that works similarly to Google's. Specifics, especially how the functionality is triggered, are unclear, other than that Chrome won't freeze tabs that play media. Tab Freezing is an automated feature that will unload tabs to free memory after five minutes of inactivity. Google removed the experiment, and it appears that tab freezing has been integrated in Chrome natively. It was not the company's first try, as it introduced and removed a tab discard feature back in 2015 in the browser. Google introduced Tab Freeze as an experiment in the company's Chrome browser in 2019. The implementation of the feature in browsers that support it Snooze Tabs is available as a separate extension (not by Mozilla, it appears) though. Mozilla ran a Snooze Tabs experiment in 2017 but did not integrate the functionality natively in Firefox.Most Chromium-based web browsers support the experimental feature Tab Groups, and with that feature comes another experiment that supports Tab Groups Collapse Freezing which improves resource usage.Firefox supports automatic tab unloading.Which browsers do support tab snoozing natively? How much control do users have over the feature? Best needs to be defined, and in this case, we are focusing on usability. Since tab snoozing is coming to more and more browsers, it may be interesting to see which have the best implementation at the time. A click reloads the content so that the site's content becomes accessible again. Unlike closing tabs, which removes the information from the tab bar, sleeping usually keeps the tab open in the tab bar but in an unloaded state. The feature is designed to save resources, memory in particular, by unloading tabs and putting them to sleep. Tab snoozing, also known as tab sleeping or freezing, is not a new feature, but it is getting added to more and more web browsers natively.
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