Microsoft Edge could receive in a relatively short time a new feature potentially very useful for gamers, especially those who own systems that are not necessarily exaggerated: namely the ability to limit the amount of RAM used by the browser. Of course, it’s obvious that it could be useful for anyone, but Microsoft plans to let the user choose whether to apply the limit always or only when there is a game running.
The new feature, which is wrapped up in a specific browser settings page, has already been spotted on some instances of the browser available in the Canary channel for users enrolled in the Insider program, but apparently it is a gradual release and only affects a portion of users. As a reminder, the Canary channel is very unstable, is designed specifically for testing purposes between developers and is absolutely not suitable for normal use.
Apparently, the browser will show a slider whose full scale is the maximum amount of RAM (8, 16, 32 GB…) installed in the computer. Just move to the right or left to increase or decrease (respectively) the allocating RAM limit. If you set a value too low, however, Edge will warn you that you may have performance issues.
Edge, we recall, has been based on Chromium, the same engine behind Chrome, for a few years now; Chromium is open-source and predominantly developed by Google. It’s certainly no secret that the Mountain View browser is quite expensive in terms of RAM – memes and jokes about it were very recurring until a few years ago – but in recent years Google has put a lot of effort into optimizing performance and memory consumption. A little more user control shouldn’t hurt too much though, at least we hope.