There may be a new contender for the top performing browser title if Microsoft's latest update is to be believed.
The IT giant has claimed that its Microsoft Edge offering saves a lot of RAM for users around the world with one of its most popular tools.
In a tweet (opens in a new tab), the Microsoft Edge Dev account revealed that it had seen the browser's Sleeping Tabs tool save users 273 petabytes of RAM in the last 28 days alone.
Use inactive tabs to save resources? You are not alone ! In the last 28 days on Windows devices, we slept 6 billion tabs, saving 273,7 petabytes of RAM. That's about 39,1 megabytes saved per tab. 😲 pic.twitter.com/hgTcpcMwvhJune 6, 2022
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Microsoft Edge sleep tabs
The stat is even more impressive as it appears to be only on Windows devices, meaning the total number could be even higher. Microsoft claims that this equates to about 39,1 MB saved per tab, which helps improve efficiency and battery life on user devices.
Sleep Tabs for Microsoft Edge (Opens in a new tab) was first revealed in December 2020, when the company said that using the feature would help reduce memory usage by 32% on average and reduce computer usage. Browser CPU at about 37% in most cases.
The tool received a helpful update in August 2021, which means Edge users can opt to have tabs go to sleep after just one minute of inactivity, minimizing the time before resource savings start to kick in. effect from the initial period of two hours.
Microsoft also gave users the option to see specific memory savings by hovering over a sleep tab at the top of the browser window.
The company now hopes this news will be enough to help bring users back to Microsoft Edge after user numbers have stagnated in recent months.
The most recent figures from Statcounter showed that Microsoft Edge had either lost or failed to gain market share in four of the last six months.
This puts Edge with a market share of 4,05% (across mobile and desktop platforms), which equates to around 200 million users, far behind Google Chrome (64,34%) and Apple's Safari (19,16 .3,41%), but ahead of Firefox (XNUMX%).