In the past 20 or so years, browsers have grown significantly. From tools used solely to display webpages to general purpose tools. Yes, you can still open webpages in modern browsers, but that is not all.
Nowadays, browsers are used to watch media streams, play highly demanding games, or do your homework. It comes as no surprise that RAM usage of browser processes has gone up significantly as well.
Browsers can easily use 1 gigabyte of RAM or more these days. Much of it depends on use. If you open a single plain text website only, you will never cross the threshold. Open a stream on Twitch, play a game in another tab, and have dozens or hundreds of tabs open, and you reach that threshold easily.
Most Chromium-based browsers may display memory usage of individual tabs. This is a recent feature addition. There is also the option to press Shift-Esc to display the built-in Task Manager, which reveals memory usage of individual browser components.
Microsoft Edge, like other Chromium-based browsers, supports a sleeping tabs feature next to that. The main idea of it is to reduce memory use by putting inactive tabs into sleep mode. Microsoft says that the feature saves an average of 39.1 MB per tab.
Microsoft Edge: control memory usage
Microsoft is working on another feature to tame the browser’s memory usage. The new resource controls option gives users control over the maximum amount of RAM that Edge may use.
It is disabled by default, which means that Edge may use as much RAM as available. Once activated, options are provided to limit RAM usage always or when playing PC games.
The new preference is found under Settings > System and performance > Resource controls.
Once enabled, you may use a slider to set a RAM limit in gigabyte. The lowest amount selectable is 1 gigabyte, the highest the available RAM of the system. You may increase or decrease the limit in 1 gigabyte steps.
When you enable the new feature, RAM usage is displayed in Browser Essentials under performance.
You need to run the latest Microsoft Edge Canary release and start the browser with the parameter –enable-features=msEdgeResourceControlsRamLimiter to get access to it.
Here is what happens when Microsoft Edge reaches the designated RAM limit: it puts tabs to sleep in order to reduce Edge’s RAM use.
Closing Words
It is too early to say if the feature will ever make it into Edge stable. If it does, it will likely remain a niche feature. While it may help some users free up RAM for other activities on the PC, most may prefer to close Edge instead, if they do not use the browser actively at the time.
Usefulness depends on how you use your system and Edge. If you use Edge all the time, you may benefit from it. There are downsides, on the other hand. Edge puts tabs to sleep and you get no say in the matter. If you need access to those tabs, you need to wake them up again.
All in all, Edge’s new RAM usage feature is a niche feature. It might grow to something more in organizations and for some edge cases.
Now You: what is your take on limiting RAM usage in browsers? (via Leopeva)