Microsoft adds Startup Boost, Sleeping Tabs to Edge build 89

This week, Microsoft announced a number of other features running off of Edge from the Beta Inner Channel. These features include Startup Boost, Sleep Tabs, Vertical Tabs and a more navigable History dialog. The company also announced some welcome interface adjustments to Bing – prompting Microsoft to categorize them as Edge features, but these items seem to apply just as much to Bing in any browser so far.

If you are unfamiliar with the release and download system of Microsoft Edge, there are three Insider channels (Canary, Dev and Beta) that represent daily, weekly and six-weekly updates in increasing order of stability. New features debut there before finally going to Stable, where normal users will encounter them.

If you’re a Windows user, you can not actually download new builds directly in the Stable channel. Instead, look for it in Windows Update or at edge://settings/help in the browser and asks Edge to check for updates for himself. If you also want to see the Edge Insider builds, you can do so safely – it does not replace your Edge Stable; they install side by side, with separate icons on your taskbar that make it easy to distinguish.

Startup Boost

Edge’s new Startup Boost feature is pretty simple. Instead of killing all processes when you close the browser, leave a minimal set open and turn on. Microsoft says that these always-on-background processes reduce Edge launch times, either from an Edge icon or automatically as a link to hyperlinks from other applications, by 29% to 41%.

Microsoft also says that the 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 do not like it, you can disable it on your system – go to edge://settings/system and deactivate Continue running background apps when Microsoft Edge is closed.

Sleeping places

With Edge’s new Sleeping Tabs feature, tabs are automatically put to sleep – built on Chromium’s “tab freezing” feature – after two hours of uninterrupted background status. You can manually adjust this time-out period if it is not convenient for you, and Edge also uses heuristics to detect instances when sleep may be inappropriate (for example, tabs streaming music in the background).

You can see which tabs went to sleep in the tab bar due to the faded appearance; by clicking on a sleeping place, it is awakened and brought to the fore again. To our disappointment, there is no option to right-click on a tab and put it to sleep manually – all you can do is wait for the browser to do this for you after a long period of inactivity. .

Vertical tabs

Vertical tabs – a feature we first reported on almost a year ago – finally made it appear in Edge Stable 89 this week.

Modern screens usually have almost twice as much horizontal real estate as vertical, and by placing the tabs, application icons, etc. over the horizontal axis of the screen, the workspace you have is used more efficiently.

Edge is certainly not the first application to notice this fact – for example, Ubuntu has started using a vertical application launcher (equivalent to the Windows taskbar). We have found that using screen fixtures more efficiently is a good idea, but many users have an immediate, strong negative reaction to such a basic change in their navigation concepts.

Probably for this reason, Microsoft has left the default orientation on the tab bar horizontal. However, if you want to scroll as it is in 2021, the new vertical tab is a single click away – it resets it as you found it.

History Hub

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

The History menu drop-down menu also has a sticker icon at the top right – clicking on the pen dynamically resizes the browser panel and makes room for a persistent, pinned history window on its right. The History window stays in place and is visible when you browse the Internet, either by linking to pages or by clicking on the History links yourself. This makes it much easier to find what you have been looking for in the recent past.

Bing Updates

With the roundup of the treats this week, Microsoft has announced some updates on how it displays search results. These updates are also referred to as Edge enhancements, but when we checked bing.com in Google Chrome on a Linux workstation, we saw the same results there.

Local search results in Bing will start showing stickpins on a map, which will be dynamically updated as you scroll through it. This makes it easier to sort your search results by geographic area – which is not always as simple as “what’s closest” or “what’s farthest away.” This feature has not yet been fully implemented; Microsoft says it will be fully available in the US in the coming weeks.

The search engine also adjusts the search results contextually if it first understands the broad category you are looking for. Carousel results for recipes now contain dynamically updated rows that contain calorie information along with the image and metatext of the recipe, for example. Documentary movie search results are another great showcase for this update. They appear in tiles displaying subject matter, title, and something else; hovering over each tile opens up further detailed information about the film.

Ultimately, educational searches can yield more easily digestible, infographic-style returns instead of the simple dense text-based output we’ve become familiar with over the past two decades. It is not clear exactly what topics the infographic returns receive or not, or how they are generated, but Microsoft is showing the example of a Bing search for ‘camel’ as an example.