The latest version of Microsoft’s Edge web browser is designed to launch as much as 41-percent more quickly thanks to a new “Startup boost” feature. At the same time, Microsoft is also reducing resource consumption by implementing support for “sleeping tabs,” allowing browser tabs to use less CPU and memory resources when they’re in the background.
Another new feature in Microsoft Edge 89? Support for viewing your browser tabs in a vertical stack. It’s an optional feature though, so if you prefer horizontal tabs, you can continue to use them.
If you have a display that’s wider than it is tall, placing the tabs along the left side of the screen can save you a bit of space. While that can come in handy on a 16:9 display, it’s even more useful if you happen to have a wider display like the 2560 x 1080 pixel monitor I’m looking at as I type this sentence.
In order to enable vertical tabs, just click the little arrow button on the right side of the tab bar. If you want to switch back to vertical tabs, click the version of this icon that shows up at the top of the tab stack.
Once you’ve switched to vertical tabs you can either view a thin strip of favicons for all of the websites that are currently open in your browser, or expand the view so you can see the full names of those sites.
By default, the tab list will auto-expand when you hover your mouse over the favicons, but if you don’t pin the list to stay open all the time, it will shrink back once you move your mouse away.
Vertical tabs aren’t exactly a new idea. Third-party plugins have allowed you to stack your tabs vertically in Chrome and other browsers for years, and Vivaldi has supported vertical tab stacking since it first launched 2016, and Opera has had them for more than a decade.
Microsoft has been testing vertical tabs for Edge for nearly a year, but Edge 89 is the first stable channel version of the web browser to include the feature.
Other changes in Edge 89 include support for sleeping tabs, which Microsoft says can reduce CPU usage for sleeping tabs by around 26-percent and memory usage by 16-percent, and Startup boost, which the company says runs “a set of core Microsoft Edge processes in the background without adding additional resources when Microsoft Edge browser windows are open.”
via The Verge
StartupBoost sounds a lot like we don’t shut down boost if you read what it is. They keep Edge running in the background..
I thought we were meant to have a choice of browser and that it was decoupled from the operating system, wasn’t there a court case?
Well, uh, they never reached a verdict in that one. Just a settlement that as long as Microsoft let other browsers have some APIs it was keeping proprietary (activex, I think?), it’s okay for anyone, including google, keep a web browser as part of your OS that the user can’t uninstall.
Noice.