Microsoft has released version 88 of its Chromium-based Edge browser with sleeping tab performance improvements, vertical tabs, and improved tools to manage browser cookies.
Back in August, ZDNet's Steven J Vaughan-Nichols found that Chromium-based Edge was consistently poor in performance benchmarks[1] while Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Vivaldi each showed bright spots in various tests.
Since then, Microsoft's Edge team has been working to rectify Edge's performance. In September it showed off its new sleeping tabs feature in Edge[2], which it said could significantly reduce memory and CPU use as well as reduce the load on laptop batteries.
The new sleeping tabs feature is rolling out in the Edge beta version 88. Sleeping tabs boost performance by putting inactive tabs to sleep to free up system resources like memory and CPU for active tabs or other applications.
According to Microsoft's internal tests[3], sleeping tabs on Edge reduces memory use by 32% on average. A sleeping tab uses 37% less CPU on average than a non-sleeping tab. It's been testing the feature with Edge users on the Microsoft Edge Canary and Dev channels.
The Edge beta channel includes an option to put tabs to sleep after five minutes of inactivity and provides group policies for admins to manage sleeping tabs. Users can tell if a tab is asleep because the tab is faded.
Edge now contains a feature called startup boost that makes Edge launch faster by having it run in the background. It's currently an experimental feature that is only being rolled out to some users.
Also in this update are the long-awaited vertical tabs[4], which help users manage multiple tabs and multitask.
"Vertical tabs let users move their tabs to the side, where vertically