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Chrome doesn’t have this (though there are extensions that emulate it), but Microsoft Edge does – and it’s a lot easier on the eyes, with a manila-colored background. Safari users enjoy an excellent Reader Mode feature that strips out ads and other distractions, providing you with just text. Chrome has this in a feature dubbed Tab Freeze, but with Edge you can control how long before tabs are suspended. As I work with the two, Chrome consistently uses significantly more memory than Edge when the same pages are loaded.Īnother example where Microsoft is ahead of Google on resource management: Sleeping Tabs, which suspend web pages after a specified amount of time to free up CPU and memory. When I launch Chrome on an Intel-based Mac running macOS 11.2.3, it takes around 900 megabytes once loaded. Although Edge is built on the same foundation, Microsoft has tuned it better. Firefox was known as a memory and resource hog at the the time, a reputation that now dogs Chrome. When Chrome originally launched in the late 2000s for Windows, it was touted as a leaner alternative to Firefox, which in turn was considered an alternative to Internet Explorer. But it’s not the only feature that makes it a great browser to use on a Mac, and certainly make it a better pick than Chrome.
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T took me about 10 minutes of using this new version before I was sold. Microsoft Edge for Mac with vertical tabs pinned open.
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