In brief: Microsoft shouting loudly about how great Edge is and why it's so much better than Chrome isn't something new, but Redmond's recently statistic regarding the browser is quite interesting. According to its maker, Edge's Sleeping Tabs feature has saved users a combined 273.7 Petabytes of RAM over the last 28 days, which works out at about 39 MB of memory for every open tab.
The stat was tweeted by the official Microsoft Edge Dev account. It notes that the Sleeping Tabs feature was used on six billion tabs across Windows devices over the past 28 days, resulting in a saving of 273.7 Petabytes (273,700 TB) of RAM savings, or 39.1 MB of RAM saved per each tab.
Use sleeping tabs to save resources? You aren't alone! Over the past 28 days on Windows devices, we slept 6 billion tabs resulting in a savings of 273.7 Petabytes of RAM. That's roughly 39.1 megabytes saved per tab. 😲 pic.twitter.com/hgTcpcMwvh
--- Microsoft Edge Dev (@MSEdgeDev) June 6, 2022
Sleeping Tabs, added to Edge back in January last year, is a featured designed for those users who like to keep dozens of browser tabs open at the same time (i.e., most of us). This can eat up system resources such as RAM and CPU usage, but Sleeping Tab builds on Chromium's "freezing" technology to essentially put unused tabs to 'sleep' after they haven't been accessed for two hours, helping free up the memory and CPU.
While 39 MB per tab might not sound like a huge saving, it can make a difference when there is a slew of tabs open on low-end devices that aren't packing a lot of memory. Sleeping Tabs can also help extend the battery life of laptops.
Sleeping Tabs is enabled by default in Edge, though the amount of time before a tab is made inactive can be changed in the browser's Settings menu under System and Performance - Optimize Performance.
Back in April, Edge squeezed out Safari to become the second-most-popular desktop browser globally. It currently has a 10% share---still a long way from Chrome's massive 66% slice of the pie.