Microsoft Is Letting Users Control How Much RAM Edge Uses in Test Build

Web browsers sucking up precious resources from our computers is not a new phenomenon. Still, now Microsoft has one weird trick to fix a situation that has bedeviled PC users for ages. In the latest test build of its Edge browser, the company is letting users set a hard limit for how much memory the browser can utilize, which could be a godsend on devices with lesser amounts of memory.
The latest version of Microsoft Edge is available in the company’s Canary channel, which offers pre-release software to test new features. One of those new features for Edge is called “Resource Controls” in the settings menu. According to screenshots posted on X, this new feature lets you adjust a slider that mirrors your system memory. For example, if your PC has 16GB of memory, the slider goes from 1-16. You can also toggle this feature to engage only when a game is running or just have it on all the time, which is a good addition.
Although Edge doesn’t have the same resource-hogging reputation as its main rival Chrome, both are made on the same Chromium technology, so this feature could be useful for people using Edge. Google has spent years and countless resources making Chrome more efficient with system memory. However, despite its efforts, it’s still notorious for consuming system memory even when a handful of tabs are open on some systems.
Since this version of Edge is only available to beta testers, not all users will have access to it. According to TechSpot, you can see if your Canary version of Edge offers it by going to Settings > Performance > Performance Detector to toggle “Resource Controls.” Microsoft is doing a controlled rollout of the feature, so not even all users on the Canary build will have access to it now.
Still, it’s a feature we are fully in support of, and it’ll be interesting to see if it makes it into the publicly available build someday. We also wonder if Google will ever borrow this feature for Chrome, as we’re sure many users would appreciate it.
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