Microsoft added Startup Boost, Sleeping Tabs in Edge build 89

This week, Microsoft announced several additional features that flow into Edge Stable from its internal beta channel. These features include Startup Boost, Sleeping Tabs, Vertical Tabs, and an additional navigable History dialog.The company also announced some welcome interface tweaks to Bing, which Microsoft insists on classifying as Edge features. But these lists seem to work equally well with Bing in any browser.

If you̵

7;re unfamiliar with Microsoft Edge’s release and download system, there are three Insider channels (Canary, Dev, and Beta) that represent six daily, weekly, and weekly updates to improve stability. The new features were released there before finally making their way into Stable, which ordinary users will encounter.

If you are a Windows user you will not be able to download the new builds directly in the Stable channel, but you need to search for it in Windows Update or go to edge://settings/help In a browser and asks Edge to check for updates for itself. If you want to check out Edge Insider builds, you can safely do so.These won’t replace your Edge Stable.They’re installed side by side with separate icons on your taskbar, making them easy to distinguish.

Add a start

Edge’s new Startup Boost feature is pretty simple. Instead of killing the whole process when you close your browser. Instead, it will leave a minimal set open and running.Microsoft says that these always-on background processes help reduce the time it takes for Edge to open, whether it opens from the Edge icon or automatically opens when linked with a hyperlink from an app. Other applications 29% to 41%

Microsoft also said that background processes have very little impact on the CPU and memory of the system as a whole. New features are 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.

Sleep tab

Edge’s new sleep tab feature automatically puts tabs to sleep, built on the feature. Chromium “tab freezing” after two hours of background state with no interaction. You can manually adjust this timeout if it doesn’t work for you, and Edge also uses heuristic to detect instances where sleep may not be optimal. (E.g. the tab that streams music in the background)

You can see which tabs go to sleep due to the faded appearance of the tab bar. Clicking on the Sleep tab will wake it up and bring it back to the foreground. To our disappointment, there is no option to right-click the tab and manually put it to sleep, all you can do is wait for the browser to perform it for you after long enough inactivity. appropriate

Vertical tab

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

Modern displays typically have almost twice the horizontal screen area than vertical, and the arrangement of tabs, application icons, and more along the horizontal axis of the display rather than vertically takes up space. Work more efficiently

Edge is definitely not the first application to notice this fact, Ubuntu started using the vertical application launcher. (Equivalent to the Windows taskbar) by default almost 10 years ago is one example. We’ve found that using screen real estate more efficiently is a good idea. But many users immediately reacted strongly to the change in basic navigation concepts.

It might be for this reason that Microsoft left the default tab bar orientation in landscape. If you want to browse like 2021, the new vertical bar can be done with just one click, just like bringing it back the way you find it.

Historic center

Edge’s new history hub is another nice, easy-to-use UX update to describe. Navigating to history from the hamburger menu (or hitting Ctrl + H) will open your history as a drop-down menu instead of a full page.

The history drop-down menu also has a stick icon in the top right, clicking on the pin to dynamically resize the browser pane, making room for the pinned history pane on the right. The History pane remains and can be seen as you explore the web, either through an in-page link or manually clicking the History link. It makes it a lot easier to find what you were looking for in the past.

Bing updates

Rounding up the goodies this week, Microsoft announced an update on how search results are displayed. These updates were billed for Edge improvements as well, but when we reviewed bing.com in Google Chrome on Linux workstations, we saw the same results there.

Local Bing results will start showing a stick pin on the map, which updates dynamically as you browse. This makes it easy to sort your search results by geographic area, which isn’t always as easy. “What’s closest” or “what’s farthest”, this feature is not yet fully available, Microsoft says it will be fully available in the US in the coming weeks.

Search engines also contextualize search results when they understand the broad category of what you are initially searching for. The carousel results for recipes now include dynamically updated panes displaying calorie information alongside images and recipe meta text, such as one example. Documentary movie search results are another good addition to this update. They appear in a tile showing an image, a title box, and a few more. Hovering over each slide opens up more detailed information about the film.

Finally, an educational search may yield more digestible infographics, rather than the plain text-dense results we’ve been accustomed to over the past two decades. It is not clear which topics will or will not be rewarded with infographics or how they are generated, but Microsoft shows Bing’s “animal giraffe” search results as one example.