How to Turn On or Off Sleeping Tabs in Microsoft Edge

This post shows students and new users steps to enable or disable Sleeping Tabs when using Microsoft Edge browser.

Microsoft Edge browser is cross-platform, which supports all of Windows, MacOS and Linux systems. The new Microsoft Edge browser has adopted the Chromium open source project code base which offers better web compatibility and performance over the legacy edge.

A recent update to Microsoft Edge brings a new feature called sleeping tabs, which helps improve memory and CPU utilization of the browser.

The sleeping tabs feature in Microsoft Edge makes background tabs sleep after two hours of inactivity in order to free up resources for active tabs, new tabs, and other applications on your device.

Sleeping tabs will fade to indicate they’ve released resources. To resume a sleeping tab, click on it like a normal tab. The tab will un-fade and your content will be immediately available. 

Below is how to enable or disable the new sleeping tabs feature in Microsoft Edge browser.

How to enable or disable sleeping tabs in Microsoft Edge browser

As mentioned above, the sleeping tabs feature in Microsoft Edge makes background tabs sleep after two hours of inactivity in order to free up resources for active tabs, new tabs, and other applications on your device.

To turn On or Off sleeping tabs, first open Microsoft Edge browser

Then click on the Settings and more (ellipse 3 dots) at top right corner, and select Settings.

On the Settings page, select System and performance on the left.

Alternatively, you can use the URL below to go directly there.

edge://settings/system

There, under Optimize Performance, toggle the switch to On or Off for the tile “Save resources with sleeping tabs” to enable or disable sleeping tabs in Edge.

That should do it!

Conclusion:

This post showed you how to enable or disable the new sleeping tabs feature in Microsoft Edge. If you find any error above or have something to share, please use the comment form below.