Microsoft has been working on a new ‘tab restoration’ feature for the open-source Chromium platform that will improve the performance of both Edge and Chrome. In a new design doc, Microsoft has finally detailed how it plans to improve browsers’ tab retention and improve your experience.
It is normal for users to accidentally close their browsers and lose open tabs, including their important browsing sessions.
Google Chrome comes with the tab retention feature to restore lost tabs and allow users to resume their browsing session, but this feature is far from perfect.
Google Chrome currently comes with “Snapshotting Command Storage Manager” that uses a “current session” and a “last session” logic to detect when a new session is created and when the previous session becomes the last session.
When a new session is created, Google Chrome deletes any other files, such as the previous last session, from disk and the data is lost. This affects the function of tab restoration and retention in the browser.
Microsoft is proposing a new feature for both Chrome and Edge that will use a new current session and stored sessions architecture. Unlike the current architecture, the stored sessions feature is designed to calculate and use a variable amount of session files that includes the sessions retained in storage for tab restore services.
“The UX for each restore service differs, where session restore command is used to restore the most recent session, and tab restore can be useful to restore individual tabs & windows from multiple previous sessions,” Microsoft said.
Microsoft says this feature is designed for Windows 10, macOS, and even ChromeOS.
While Microsoft is not aware of any security issues, the company says this work has the potential to impact the performance of the read operations of the stored files.
This is because Microsoft’s proposal is designed to increase the session files for restoring your tabs and there is a potential impact on increasing read times.
The tech giant has already started making alterations to the tab restoration capability in Chromium repository and users might see these improvements benefiting Edge and Chrome later this year.
