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BROWSERS

By Mary Branscombe • Comment about this article

There are a lot of useful features in the Edge browser that you might not have found — because they’re so well hidden.

When I looked at all the different ways of taking screenshots in Windows recently, I included the screenshot tools in Edge and the handy Ctrl+Shift+S keyboard shortcut for opening that tool. One reason why that keyboard shortcut is so handy: there are so many extra tools for managing the browser that are crammed into the rather overloaded Settings and more menu, represented by the three-dot icon (…) on Edge’s toolbar.

Press Alt+F or click the three dots, and you get a slightly overwhelming list, with some of the most useful tools tucked away on the More tools flyout or in the Browser essentials sidebar. This is over and above what’s on the Settings page, which has so many options in its 17 sections that it’s often easier to just search for what you want rather than to navigate to it.

There are more tools in the address field, although you won’t see them all on every site. Edge chooses those appropriate for the particular page. The Read aloud icon (a capital A with two curved lines on the right) is usually present and will open a toolbar with play and pause controls for the synthesized voice that reads the page. For long pages, the Immersive reader icon (three dots in a circle) appears; clicking it will display the page in a more readable form, which you can control with text preferences (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Immersive reader mode in Edge strips out a lot of the distractions on webpages and lets you view sites the way you find most legible; click the book icon to get back to the normal webpage.

Other tools are tucked in where they’re most useful. If you right-click on an image, you’ll find the obvious options — such as copying the image or using it in a Web search — but you can also add it to a collection or open it in Edge’s magnify window. Right-click and choose Magnify image, or hover over the image and press Ctrl twice to open the image at a larger size in its own pop-up window.

Figure 2. The magnifier opens an image in its own window on top of its webpage. Once you’ve magnified the image, you can zoom in even further without messing up the zoom level of the rest of the page.

Choose Browser essentials from the Settings and more menu. Edge will open a sidebar that shows some statistics about how much memory it’s saving by putting unused tabs to sleep in the background and how many sites the SmartScreen feature has checked for you.

Figure 3. Depending on the state of your browser, the Browser essentials sidebar might give you tools to reclaim resources from open tabs that are slowing Edge down. It also offers a button to update the browser or just stats about resource usage.

Unless you’re running into performance problems, this isn’t particularly essential information. However, it does indicate clearly when there is an Edge update to install, by adding a large Update button with a heartbeat icon on the toolbar. That opens Browser essentials, where you can click Restart now to install the update.

And if you have a browser tab open that Edge considers “unhealthy” (because it’s using too much RAM or CPU in the background), the browser will put a red dot on the heartbeat icon to warn you to open the sidebar and look at the Performance section in the Browser essentials sidebar.

This shows which tabs are using too many resources. You can click Sleep these tabs or Close these tabs, depending on whether you need them any longer. If you want to choose what to do with each tab individually, click the … next to the tab name and pick Sleep tab or Close tab.

This is a good moment to mention that Edge is undergoing rapid evolution. During the edit of this article, it became evident that a forthcoming change will probably rename “Browser essentials” to “Performance.” For this article, I used Edge version 136.0.3240.64 (Official build). Version 137 is due on May 29. (Will Fastie has already seen that renaming because he’s using the Dev build, which is currently 137.)

You get a lot more detail from the Browser Task Manager (which, sadly, doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut) on the More tools flyout of the Settings and More menu. But even though you can close misbehaving pages from the Browser Task Manager, that action won’t close the tab where the page was located. When you return to the browser window, you’ll see a browser tab with an error message. Close the tab from the performance detector instead, and it goes away completely.

Figure 4. Open the Browser Task Manager to get more details about memoryh and storage use in Edge, including how much is going to browser components.

Browser essentials is also a quick way to change some settings which would otherwise take a lot of scrolling to find in Edge’s Settings. Click on the three dots next to the Performance heading, and choose Manage Performance settings to jump straight to the options for Efficiency mode and how tabs are sent to sleep. You will also find in this section some newer options for limiting how much memory Edge can use. (These have been in the Beta channel since May 2025 but are now in the stable channel.)

Figure 5. Use Put inactive tabs to sleep after the specified amount of time to choose how aggressively Edge tries to save battery power and how quickly — anywhere between 30 seconds and 12 hours — inactive tabs get paused.

When a tab is open but not visible (because you’re looking at a different tab, or the browser window is minimized) and isn’t doing anything that would keep it active (such as playing audio, running a video meeting, using your webcam, or being mirrored by a screencast), Edge puts the tab to sleep. It stops running any scripts on that page, reclaims some of the memory and most of the CPU resources allocated to the tab, and checks back for changes only occasionally.

That frees up resources for Windows to use for other things and helps battery life if you’re on a laptop. There’s still some memory allocated to it, so when you switch back to the tab, it will start running again without needing to be reloaded.

You can see which tabs in Edge are sleeping because they look slightly faded. If you don’t need that visual indication, you can turn off Fade sleeping tabs. And if there are sites you never want to sleep, because you know they don’t resume properly (or you need something on the site that requires a timer to keep running in the background), click Add under Never put these sites to sleep, then type or paste the full URL of the site and select Add.

Adding a site to the Never put these sites to sleep list also excludes the site from Efficiency mode, which reduces the CPU resources and memory allocated to browser tabs, saving battery power even when they’re open and visible. Microsoft estimates that you can get up to 25 minutes of extra battery life this way, depending on how many tabs you typically have open. It’s a good trade-off for possibly janky video playback or other slowdowns, and it saves you from closing tabs you’ll only have to find and open again later. Think of it as a browser-specific version of the battery-saver setting in Windows.

If you play games in your browser or use other demanding websites that need those resources to stay responsive, add them to the sleep-block list.

The default Efficiency mode setting is Balanced, which balances power savings and browser performance while you have a reasonable amount of battery life but restricts browser resources when battery life is low. If you know you won’t be able to plug in for several hours, you can turn on Maximum savings. This jumps straight to restricting browser resources more significantly — as if your device were already in a low-battery state.

Unless you specifically choose to use Efficiency mode even when plugged in (Turn on Efficiency mode when connected to power), it will activate only when your laptop is unplugged. You can see the status in the Browser essentials sidebar, and Edge will show the heartbeat icon with a green dot to show that it’s being “green” and saving power. Efficiency mode overrides whatever time-out you have set for sleeping tabs, putting them to sleep after 30 minutes — or just five minutes if you have a low battery or you turn on Maximum savings.

This isn’t the same efficiency mode you might see in the Windows 11 task manager (marked by a green leaf icon). The latter limits the resources available to all applications when the CPU is heavily loaded, both for performance and to save battery life. If you don’t want to automatically reduce resource usage — for example, when you’re playing a demanding game — you’ll need to turn off both versions of Efficiency mode, both in Edge and also by right-clicking the applications in task manager that have the green leaf icon and choosing Efficiency mode on the context menu.

Usually, it’s better to leave Windows and Edge to manage memory for you, but if the browser is slowing down a desktop game or a demanding application such as video or photo editing, you can use the new Resource controls to manage how much memory Edge can use — and thus free up RAM for other things.

Scroll down through the System and performance settings to Manage your performance and turn on Resource controls. Drag the Control how much RAM Edge can use slider to set how much memory the browser gets.

Figure 6. Turn on Resource controls in Settings (on the left), and you’ll see how much of the memory you’re allowing Edge to use is already in use. Under RAM usage (on the right), you’ll see how much is still available.

If there are websites you use so frequently that you just leave them open, making a tab group simplifies how to get back to them. But if you prefer to use multiple browser windows to organize your open tabs, you can give each window a name to make it easy to find them when you switch windows. This is handy when you’re researching a few different topics at the same time.

Choose Name this window … from the More tools flyout of the Settings and More menu, and type in a name. This will replace the title of all the tabs; if that turns out to be annoying, go back to Name window …, delete the name you typed in, and then click OK.

Figure 7. Naming a browser window

If you use a webpage so often that you want to treat it as if it were an application by pinning it to the taskbar, Edge lets you treat any tab as a Progressive Web App (PWA). This was originally designed for websites written so they are most useful when you’re online but still work if you’re not connected. However, you can use it for any site you want to keep around.

If you use webmail rather than an email client, or a social media service like Bluesky that has mobile apps but no Windows client, or if you need a conference website open for a few days, go to that site in Edge and then choose … | Apps | Install this site as an app.

Behind the scenes, Edge saves some information about the site in the folder Windows uses for Store apps, adds it to the Start menu, and then opens it in its own window — without the browser toolbar and with a very minimal menu. You can now pin it to the taskbar. When you no longer need it as an app, uninstall it.

Alternatively, you can add sites as shortcuts to the Edge sidebar. Note that in the descriptions that follow, I’m assuming you have the sidebar enabled. If not, open Edge’s settings (Alt+F, then click Settings); go to Appearance | Copilot and sidebar and select Always on or Auto hidden. If the Sidebar is set to Off, the keyboard combos mentioned here will not work. Whens the setting is Auto hidden, Ctrl-Shift+/ (slash) will toggle the sidebar on and off. If the sidebar is not visible, clicking the Copilot button in Edge’s toolbar or using the combo Ctrl-Shift+. (period) will also make it appear, along with the full Copilot sidebar.

You can already right-click on a link and choose Open in sidebar. Pressing Ctrl+Shift+E after selecting text on a webpage runs a Bing search in the sidebar rather than in a new tab. (Or choose Search in sidebar after you right-click.)

The sidebar has a set of tools from Bing: a calculator, unit converter, dictionary, translator, world clock, and so on. But you can add your favorite reference site or a social network such as Mastodon or Bluesky. Click the + button (or right-click on one of the tools or apps that are already pinned, and choose Customize sidebar) to see a long list of suggested sites to add.

You’re not limited to what’s on that list. The current webpage shows up as a tile above the list; click Open in sidebar to move it to the sidebar to check how well it works there. If it’s useful at sidebar size, right-click on the icon for the site that Edge adds to the lower section of the sidebar navigation, and choose Pin to sidebar. If you don’t pin the site, the icon will stay in the sidebar until you close the window.

Figure 8. Add any webpage to the Edge sidebar by clicking Open in sidebar. You’ll get an icon you can pin to the sidebar navigation.

That’s also how to get rid of sites and apps you don’t need on the sidebar: right-click their icon and choose Remove from sidebar.

Figure 9. Just because you put a site in the sidebar doesn’t mean it’s stuck there. If you want to put it back in the main tab, click the Open link in new button icon at the top of the sidebar.

Microsoft makes changes to the Edge interface fairly frequently. Some of the options covered here changed while I was writing this piece and others changed after I finished. If you’re visiting from the future, some of the options may have changed again!

There are many more settings in Edge; some of the most useful ones control how much information about you and your browsing habits a site retains. In a future article, I’ll look at the choices you can make regarding tracking and what trade-offs those involve.

Contribute your thoughts in this article’s forum!

Mary Branscombe has been a technology journalist for nearly three decades, writing for a wide range of publications. She’s been using OneNote since the very first beta was announced — when, in her enthusiasm, she trapped the creator of the software in a corner.

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