Turning off "Sleeping Tabs" in Microsoft Edge

I’m spending quite a bit of my time figuring out how to turn off new features in the Edge browser. The latest feature I want to give the “heave-ho” to is “sleeping tabs”. These are a great idea if you are a road warrior living off your laptop far from home and miles away from the nearest power outlet. Not that there are very many of these out there at the moment.

Sleeping tabs stop active scripts in webpages from flattening your battery. Lots of web pages are very busy even when you aren’t looking at them and all this activity means more current consumption. The latest version of Edge “freezes” inactive pages after a while. When you go back to the page it is woken up and you can use it again. Unfortunately this can cause problems for some sites. The OctoPrint 3D printer manager doesn’t seem to like being woken up. It’s amusing to watch the print progress bar frantically trying to catch up with the current print time, but this does mean that finding out how much print time is left takes longer than it should.

You can find the option to turn off sleeping tabs in the browser settings. If you are running from a laptop and you want to save as much power as possible you can specify sites that are to stay awake and let the rest sleep on. Me, I’m running on a desktop so I just let everything keep going.

Making QR Codes in Edge

Further to my QR Code fun and games recently I’ve just discovered that you can get the Edge browser to generate QR codes for web sites. I think this feature is also available in Chrome because that is what Edge is now based on. This can be a neat way of sharing a complicated link. Rather than try to copy and paste it you can just take a picture. You need to enable it, as at the moment it is an experimental feature. Start by going to the address in Edge:

edge://flags/#sharing-qr-code-generator

Change the setting to Enabled, as you can see above. Now you can right click on a page that you want to share as a QR code and pick Create QR code for this page.

The QR code is created as an image you can photograph or download. I rather like the distinctive dot format, quite stylish.