Microsoft Edge gets a password generator, pre-made themes, and 'sleeping tabs'

In brief: Microsoft's updated, Chromium-based Edge browser is a pretty solid alternative to the likes of Chrome or Firefox. Fortunately, it's about to get even better: this month, a plethora of new Edge features are rolling out. These additions range from pre-made themes to an all-new password generation tool.

These features were revealed in a blog post published by Windows executive Liat Ben-Zur today. A significant portion of the text focuses on changes Microsoft is making to its Bing search browser, but we won't go into those here.

What we will do is dive a little deeper into the improvements coming to Edge, starting with themes. Just like other browsers, Edge's themes change things like your tab colors and the background image of new tab pages. Menus remain largely unchanged, but it's still a nice way to add a dose of personality to your browser. There are 24 Microsoft-approved themes to choose from for now – I'm partial to "Wandering Fields," personally.

On top of that, Edge's various icons will soon be brought in line with Microsoft's "Fluent Design" system. Moving forward, users will notice the icons becoming rounded, softer, and more consistent across the board.

Fortunately, neither of these changes will come at the cost of browser performance. Quite the opposite, in fact: Microsoft Edge now features "sleeping tabs" functionality, essentially meaning that inactive tabs will no longer hog system memory and CPU resources. This could be a game-changer for multitaskers with lower-end systems, but the feature is not enabled by default. You'll need to visit Edge's "System" settings menu to switch it on.

The final major feature of note arriving in Edge soon is an expansion to the browser's password management capabilities. It can already save passwords that you enter on various websites, but now, you can generate them on the fly.

This feature triggers automatically when Edge detects that you're signing up for a new service, or changing a password on an existing one. It's not clear whether you can generate passwords at will, however.