What you need to know
- The teams behind Microsoft Edge and Teams have paired up to produce their new Detached Elements tool.
- It's designed to aid in debugging memory leaks.
- You can find the "Detached Elements" panel inside Microsoft Edge 97 and subsequent releases.
Memory leaks are no fun. They mess with performance and can be tricky to patch up. That's why Microsoft has made a new Detached Elements tool to identify problems and help stop leaks.
You can check out Microsoft's developer-focused blog post for a full and proper rundown of how the Detached Elements tool works. For those of you outside the loop on what memory leaks even are, though, here's the Windows 11 maker's description: "Memory leaks occur when the JavaScript code of an application retains more and more objects in memory that it doesn't need any longer instead of releasing them for the browser to garbage collect (GC). For long-running apps, small memory leaks of only a few kilobytes can add up to noticeably degrade performance over time."
You can test out the new tool's capabilities via a demo app located over on GitHub. It will let you simulate memory leaks and see where the Detachable Elements utility comes in handy. However, Microsoft urges those interested in its new creation to test out the tool in real scenarios to discover any potential problems. As usual, the company welcomes developer feedback, which can be given via the DevTools feedback button or, alternatively, by throwing tweets at the Edge DevTools Twitter account.
There's an extensive amount of documentation on the tool over at Microsoft's site if you really want to dig into the weeds of it and learn more.
