Edge will probably let you limit its RAM usage
Microsoft’s Edge turned out to be a pretty good replacement for the venerable Internet Explorer, but the former never reached the market share of the latter. When Edge was released in 2015, IE was the browser of choice for about 12% of users; five years later, Internet Explorer was gracefully withering away while still being used by about 1% of the web population, and Edge’s audience rose up to only 3%. Yet, Microsoft did not lose heart and pushed on, with tangible results: as of this writing, Edge is the world’s third most used browser in the world. Yes, the share is only a bit above 5%, but the approach the company practices towards continued improvement of ME may pay off nicely.
Customer-oriented features
Back in 2021, Microsoft added Performance mode to Edge, later renamed to Efficiency mode. The purpose of this feature was (and is) to optimize consumption of resources, battery power in particular. Today, most browsers have something of this kind switched on by default: tabs that are open but not focused on for about 30 minutes are offloaded, for example. In 2021, the feature was quite new, and it felt like something very friendly towards users.
A recently spotted improvement of this sort is RAM control. Currently available in a preview build released to Canary Channel (this is a sort of sandbox for testers of Microsoft products), it allows setting how much GBs of random-access memory Edge is allowed to use. It looks like the feature can be context-dependent: the user decides whether it should be activated only when a game is launched or constantly. With the resource-hungry web of today, even the mightiest of computers can falter under the weight of dozens of tabs, so this feature, combined with the aforementioned Efficiency mode, moves Edge up a notch in the rating of user-friendly web exploration software.
Thus, if you’re looking to switch browsers or, better yet, add one more program of this type to your mix – using more than one browser is perfectly fine, and it’s actually very convenient in many scenarios – Edge is a valid choice. And if Microsoft continues to be this customer-friendly, it may well become your #1.
Don’t forget to download and install Software Informer, a completely free updater that keeps everything on your computer fresh and running smoothly:
