Microsoft says Edge has saved users 273 petabytes of RAM

[midian182]

In brief: Microsoft shouting loudly about how great Edge is and why it's so much better than Chrome isn't something new, but Redmond's recently statistic regarding the browser is quite interesting. According to its maker, Edge's Sleeping Tabs feature has saved users a combined 273.7 Petabytes of RAM over the last 28 days, which works out at about 39 MB of memory for every open tab.

The stat was tweeted by the official Microsoft Edge Dev account. It notes that the Sleeping Tabs feature was used on six billion tabs across Windows devices over the past 28 days, resulting in a saving of 273.7 Petabytes (273,700 TB) of RAM savings, or 39.1 MB of RAM saved per each tab.

Use sleeping tabs to save resources? You aren't alone! Over the past 28 days on Windows devices, we slept 6 billion tabs resulting in a savings of 273.7 Petabytes of RAM. That's roughly 39.1 megabytes saved per tab. 😲 pic.twitter.com/hgTcpcMwvh

— Microsoft Edge Dev (@MSEdgeDev) June 6, 2022

Sleeping Tabs, added to Edge back in January last year, is a featured designed for those users who like to keep dozens of browser tabs open at the same time (I.e., most of us). This can eat up system resources such as RAM and CPU usage, but Sleeping Tab builds on Chromium's "freezing" technology to essentially put unused tabs to 'sleep' after they haven't been accessed for two hours, helping free up the memory and CPU.

While 39 MB per tab might not sound like a huge saving, it can make a difference when there is a slew of tabs open on low-end devices that aren't packing a lot of memory. Sleeping Tabs can also help extend the battery life of laptops.

Sleeping Tabs is enabled by default in Edge, though the amount of time before a tab is made inactive can be changed in the browser's Settings menu under System and Performance - Optimize Performance.

Back in April, Edge squeezed out Safari to become the second-most-popular desktop browser globally. It currently has a 10% share—still a long way from Chrome's massive 66% slice of the pie.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/94872-microsoft-edge-browser-has-saved-users-273-petabytes.html

 

[Nobina]

It saved me some RAM as well by not being loaded in RAM in the first place.

 

[redhat]

273 petabytes of telemetry and non telemetry data would have been more credible

 

[Carlos GarPov]

But it crashes so easily!

 

[dangh]

I was fine without internet explorer, I'll be fine without edge. I see no reason in using telemetry filled product.

 

[GoldenGoat]

How do they know this? they track every tab that is opened on every device?

 

[George Keech]

Edge is no worse that chrome, which by all accounts what most people use. In fact for work purposes edge is better for me, I don't care if Microsoft know what I do at work. - or at all frankly

 

[psycros]

Edge is no worse that chrome, which by all accounts what most people use. In fact for work purposes edge is better for me, I don't care if Microsoft know what I do at work. - or at all frankly

Do you care if the US government knows? Microsoft is their single biggest voluntary informant in Big Tech.

 

[Geralt]

Chrome is horribly heavy for RAM when you start to open tabs. People running into low memory can use OneTab extension, which transforms all tabs into a link list. Awesome solution.

 

[George Keech]

Do you care if the US government knows? Microsoft is their single biggest voluntary informant in Big Tech.

No couldn't care less

 

[Burty117]

Classic comment section for Microsoft Edge. The usual "it's reporting everything I do!" Arguments, by someone probably using Chrome, or Firefox, or Safari, or really any of the big browsers, they're all as bad as each other at this point.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

It saves me 32GB of RAM a day, as I don't use it.

 

[RudyBob]

It's a good browser with good search but I use Brave(Brave has bad search)

 

[Srksi]

But at same time, windows 10 wasted like 1 Zetabyte of ram, so it kinda comes even?

 

[Shake]

Tried Brave browser and haven't looked back ever since. No youtube ads thing of beauty

 

[asmilon]

I was fine without internet explorer, I'll be fine without edge. I see no reason in using telemetry filled product.

So my guess is that you are using a dumb phone, some obsure linux release and a 'oos version of web browser? Because everything else has in one way or another telemetry in the product.

 

[dangh]

So my guess is that you are using a dumb phone, some obsure linux release and a 'oos version of web browser? Because everything else has in one way or another telemetry in the product.

nah, wrong guess And I'm not against telemetry as a general idea, but I want to reduce collected data as much as possible, and allowing only one company to know everything about you is not to my liking.
It is easy to block telemetry servers, use duck duck go search engine / browser, and be concious of your digital footprint. And when you have so huge company like MS, who is well known for aggresive expansion by any means necessary, with history of poor browsers, integration, data access (what other company fully analyse your privately stored pictures??) then it is just normal to reduce your exposure to it.
And nah, you don't need to use any obscure linux releases; there are nearly no linux distros who do telemetry out of the box so you'd be fine even with a Deepin

 

[AmigaInside]

So, Microsoft joins the club of shady companies (usually "cleaner" product creators) throwing around random, false, wholly impressive and totally unrealistic numbers of data-saving goodness.