You Can Now Limit How Much RAM Microsoft Edge Eats Up While Gaming

Microsoft Edge continues to position itself as the sensible, performance-centric alternative to Chrome, free of the bloat that Google’s continual feature creep can sometimes result in. Now, it seems, the company is also coming after other browsers like Opera GX, as it’s just copied one of that browser’s most useful features.

As reported by Windows Latest, Edge has recently added a new Resource Controls feature, which lets you severely limit how much RAM the browser can use. This can be useful while gaming (or performing other demanding tasks), and you can even set it to only limit RAM while you’re in-game. You can give the browser access to as little as 1 GB of memory, too, so you can get especially stingy here, but note that doing so will limit you to about five active tabs while browsing modern websites. Pages might also take longer to load, especially if they have elements like video on them.

Still, that might be worth it if you’re really starved for RAM while running Edge in the background. Let’s say you have 16GB of RAM and you’re in the middle of a game. You could then limit Edge to about 4GB of max RAM usage, which should be enough to allow you to quickly check emails or a walkthrough without hurting your gaming performance.

While Resource Controls has been in beta before, Microsoft is seemingly now rolling it out to the stable build of Edge for Windows, so everyone should have access to it now (or soon). To find it, first first update your browser to the latest version (under Settings > About Microsoft Edge), then click the three-dot menu in the top-right corner and navigate to System and Performance using the sidebar that pops up.

Here, scroll down to Manage Your Performance and toggle on Resource Controls.

You’ll see a RAM slider that ranges from 1GB to however much memory your PC has installed. Choose the amount you want— Edge will warn you if your choice will slow down your browser, but it won’t stop you.

Finally, choose if you want to limit RAM only when you’re PC gaming, or always. For convenience, I prefer the former—I don’t really need it limited when I’m outside of a game.