Microsoft adds Startup Boost, Sleeping Tabs to Edge build 89

This week, Microsoft announced several other features coming to Edge Stable from its internal Beta channel. These features include Boot Boost, Hanging Guides, Vertical Guides and a more navigable history dialog. The company also announced some welcome interface tweaks for Bing – which Microsoft insists on categorizing as Edge features, but those items seem to apply equally to Bing in any browser so far.

If you are not familiar with the Microsoft Edge launch and download system, there are three Insider channels (Canary, Dev and Beta) that represent daily, weekly and six-week updates in ascending order of stability. New features are released there before they finally reach Stable, where normal users will find them.

If you are a Windows user, you cannot download new builds directly from the Stable channel. Instead, you should look for them on Windows Update or browse to edge://settings/help in the browser and ask Edge to check for updates for yourself. If you would also like to check the Edge Insider builds, you can do it safely – they will not replace your Edge Stable; they are installed side by side, with separate icons on the taskbar, making them easy to distinguish.

Boot Boost

Edge’s new Startup Boost feature is quite simple. Instead of killing all processes when closing the browser, it leaves a minimal set open and running. Microsoft says that these always-on background processes decrease Edge startup times – either open from an Edge icon or open automatically as an association with hyperlinks from other applications – by 29% to 41%.

Microsoft also says that background processes have very little impact on the CPU and memory footprint of the system as a whole. The new feature is enabled by default in Edge Stable Build 89, but if you don’t like it, you can disable it on your system – go to edge://settings/system and disable Continue running background apps when Microsoft Edge is closed.

Sleeping tablets

Edge’s new Sleeping Tabs feature automatically puts tabs to sleep – based on Chromium’s “tab freeze” feature – after two hours of uninteracted background status. You can adjust this timeout period manually if it is not suitable for you, and Edge also uses heuristics to detect cases where sleep may be inadequate (for example, guides that are streaming music in the background).

You can see which guides have been suspended due to the faded appearance on the guide bar; clicking on a drop-down tab activates it and brings it back to the foreground. To our disappointment, there is still no option to right-click on a tab and put it into standby manually – all you can do is wait for the browser to do it for you after a sufficiently long period of inactivity .

Vertical guides

Vertical guides – a feature we first reported almost a year ago – were finally released this week on the Edge Stable 89.

Modern monitors generally have almost twice as much space on the horizontal screen as on the vertical, and the organization of tabs, application icons and so on on the horizontal axis of the screen instead of vertically makes more efficient use of the workspace that you have.

Edge is certainly not the first application to notice this fact – Ubuntu started using a vertical application launcher (its equivalent to the Windows taskbar) by default almost 10 years ago, for example. We have found that more efficient use of screen space is a great idea, but many users have a strong and immediate negative reaction to this basic change in their navigation concepts.

Probably for this reason, Microsoft has left the horizontal orientation of the default guide bar. If you’d like to navigate as if it were 2021, however, the new vertical guide bar is just a click away – just like putting it back the way you found it.

History Center

Edge’s new History Hub is another welcome UX update and is simpler to use than to describe. Navigating to history from the hamburger menu (or by pressing the shortcut key Ctrl + H) opens your browsing history as a drop-down menu instead of an entire page.

The History drop-down menu also has a pin icon in the upper right corner – clicking on the pin dynamically resizes the browser panel, making room for a persistent History panel pinned to its right. The History panel remains in place and is visible while you browse the web, either through links on pages or by clicking on the History links themselves. This makes it much easier to find what you have been looking for in the recent past.

Bing updates

Completing the news this week, Microsoft announced some updates to the way it displays search results. These updates were also billed as Edge improvements, but when we checked bing.com on Google Chrome on a Linux workstation, we saw the same results there.

Local search results on Bing will start showing pins on a map, updated dynamically as you browse them. This makes it easier to sort search results by geographic area – which is not always as simple as “what’s closest” or “what’s furthest”. This feature has not yet been fully implemented; Microsoft says it will be fully available in the United States in the coming weeks.

The search engine is also adapting your search results contextually when it understands the broad category of what you’re looking for in the first place. The results of the recipe carousel now include dynamically updated dashboards that show caloric information next to the image and the recipe metatext, for example. The results of the documentary research are another good showcase for this update. They appear in blocks showing the art of the box, the title and little else; hovering the mouse over each slide opens more detailed information about the film.

Finally, educational research can provide easier to digest returns, in the style of infographic, rather than the simple output based on dense text that we have become familiar with over the past two decades. It is unclear exactly which topics will or will not receive the returns from the infographic or how they are generated, but Microsoft shows the result of a Bing search for “giraffe animal” as an example.