When you are using a web browser on a laptop, your main concern is to make the battery charge last as long as possible. Now it is not a problem if you are using your laptop in a place where a wall outlet is nearby. But when you are outside and it is nearly impossible to charge the laptop battery, then you have to think about prolonging the battery charge as much as possible.
Fortunately, Microsoft Edge web browser comes with a feature that can reduce the power consumption of your laptop drastically. This feature is called the efficiency mode. When it is enabled, Microsoft Edge web browser does not consume as much power by reserving the system resources.
Here is how it is enabled on Windows 11 PC:
- First of all you should ensure that you are using the latest version of the Edge web browser. You can download and install the latest version of Edge browser on your PC from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge.
- Launch Microsoft Edge web browser, click on the menu icon and select Performance from the menu.
- In the small window that opens, you can click on the Efficiency Mode toggle button to enable it.
- Later if you decide, you can choose to disable this after connecting your laptop to the battery charger.
According to the official Microsoft documentation, the efficiency is designed specially to extend the battery life of the mobile devices running on Windows. It is able to lower the system resources usage by modifying the tab activity. It stops processor usage by the inactive tabs (the tabs that you have not interacted with in over a minute). Similarly, it can put the inactive tabs to sleep after 5 minutes.
Under normal mode the Edge browser puts the inactive tabs to sleep after 2 hours of no interaction. But in the efficiency mode, the tabs are put to sleep after 5 minutes only.