Microsoft adds Startup Boost, Sleeping Tabs to Edge build 89

This week, Microsoft announced several more features coming to Edge Stable from its internal Beta channel. These features include Startup Boost, Sleeping Tabs, Vertical Tabs, and a more navigable History dialog. The company also announced some welcome interface tweaks for Bing, which Microsoft insists on categorizing as Edge features, but these elements seem to apply equally to Bing in any browser so far.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Microsoft Edge release and download system, there are three Insider channels (Canary, Dev, and Beta) that represent daily, weekly, and semi-annual updates in increasing order of stability. The new features debut there before finally reaching Stable, where normal users will find them.

If you are a Windows user, you can’t actually download new builds on the stable channel directly. Instead, you need to search for them in Windows Update or navigate to edge://settings/help in the browser and ask Edge to check for updates for itself. If you want to see Edge Insider builds too, you can safely do so: they won’t replace your Edge Stable; they are installed side by side, with separate icons on the taskbar to make them easy to distinguish.

Start impulse

Edge’s new Startup Boost feature is pretty simple. Instead of killing all processes when you close the browser, it leaves a minimal set open and running. Microsoft says these always-on background processes reduce Edge launch times, whether they are opened from an Edge icon or automatically opened as an association with hyperlinks in other applications, by between 29% and 41%.

Microsoft also says that background processes have very little impact on the CPU and memory footprint of the system as a whole. The new feature is enabled by default in Edge Stable Build 89, but if you don’t like it, you can disable it on your system; go to edge://settings/system and disable Continue running background apps when Microsoft Edge is closed.

Sleeping tabs

Edge’s new sleep tabs feature automatically puts tabs to sleep, based on Chromium’s “freeze tabs” feature, after two hours of no interaction in the background. You can adjust this timeout period manually if it’s not suitable for you, and Edge also uses heuristics to detect cases where sleep may be inappropriate (for example, tabs streaming music in the background).

You can see which tabs have become inactive due to their faded appearance in the tab bar; clicking on a sleeping tab activates it and comes back to the foreground. To our disappointment, there is still no option to right-click a tab and manually put it to sleep; all you can do is wait for the browser to do it for you after a long enough period of inactivity.

Vertical tabs

Vertical tabs, a feature we first reported nearly a year ago, finally launched this week in Edge Stable 89.

Modern displays generally have nearly twice as much horizontal screen real estate as vertical, and arranging tabs, app icons, etc., along the horizontal axis of the screen rather than its vertical, makes more efficient use of the screen. workspace you have.

Edge is certainly not the first application to notice this fact – Ubuntu started using a vertical application launcher (its equivalent to the Windows taskbar) by default almost 10 years ago, for example. We have found that more efficient use of screen real estate is a great idea, but many users have a strong and immediate negative reaction to such a basic change in their navigation concepts.

Probably for that reason, Microsoft left the default orientation of the tab bar horizontal. However, if you want to browse like it’s 2021, the new vertical tab bar is just one click away, as is repositioning it as you found it.

History center

Edge’s new History Hub is another welcome UX update, simpler to use than it is to describe. Navigating to History from the hamburger menu (or pressing the hotkey Ctrl + H) opens your browsing history as a drop-down menu, rather than a full page.

The History drop-down menu also has a pin icon in the upper right; clicking on it dynamically resizes the browser panel, leaving room for a fixed and persistent history panel to its right. The History panel stays in place and is visible as you browse the web, either through links on the pages or by clicking on the History links. This makes it much easier to find what you are looking for in the recent past.

Bing updates

Rounding out this week’s benefits, Microsoft announced some updates on how it displays search results. These updates were also billed as Edge enhancements, but when we checked bing.com in Google Chrome on a Linux workstation, we saw the same results there.

Your local search results in Bing will start to show markers on a map, dynamically updated as you navigate. This makes it easier to sort your search results by geographic area, which is not always as simple as “what is closest” or “what is further away.” This feature is not fully implemented yet; Microsoft says it will be fully available in the US in the coming weeks.

The search engine is also tailoring its search results contextually, when it understands the broad category of what you’re looking for in the first place. Recipe carousel results now include dynamically updated dashboards displaying calorie information along with recipe image and meta text, for example. Documentary search movie results are another good showcase for this update. They appear in mosaics that show the art of the box, the title and little else; hovering over each tile opens the slides to more detailed information about the movie.

Lastly, educational searches can yield more easily digestible infographic-style results rather than the simple dense text-based output we’ve become familiar with over the past two decades. It’s unclear exactly what topics will or won’t receive infographic returns, or how they’re generated, but Microsoft shows the result of a Bing search for “giraffe animal” as an example.