Sun Valley 2's tabbed Explorer could help to speed up Windows 11

While there are many complaints about Windows 11, there are also many things to look forward to. There are, of course, plenty of things in development that we know nothing about, but there are also many that we are aware of -- including the arrival of a much-requested tabbed option in Explorer.

But in addition to making life easier for people who need to be able to access several folders at the same time, there could be a somewhat unexpected side effect to the upcoming change: it could boost the performance of Windows 11.

See also:

• Microsoft issues emergency KB5016138 and KB5016139 patches for Windows 11 and Windows 10 to fix problems caused by Patch Tuesday updates
• Microsoft is bringing an amazing new Privacy Auditing feature to Windows 11
• Microsoft acknowledges that a Windows 11 update is causing serious connection issues

The benefits come from that fact that having several folders open in tabs rather than individual Explorer windows uses fewer system resources. It's not enough to say that tabbed Explorer looks so much neater than having endless windows open. There is much more to look forward to than that.

Nor is it enough to say that the feature will help boost productivity by reducing the need to hunt through numerous instances of Explorer. What Microsoft has kept quite quiet about -- although you may have predicted the happy side effect yourself -- is that memory usage is significantly reduced.

WindowsLatest is among those to have noticed that tabbed Explorer's memory usage is impressively low. This is clearly something to be welcomed, and while it will help to improve performance for just about everyone, it will be most noticeable on systems with relatively small amounts of RAM installed.

Although tabbed Explorer is not available to everyone yet, it won't be long until it is. The Explorer upgrade is part of the Sun Valley 2 update (Windows 11 22H2) which is due for release in the next few months.