If your browser feels like it is wading through digital molasses, you are likely a victim of a Windows 11 feature called Efficiency Mode. Designed to save battery life, this feature often backfires by throttling your most important background tabs. If you open your Task Manager and see a little green leaf icon next to Google Chrome, your system is intentionally slowing down your browsing to save a few milliwatts of power.
The Green Leaf Problem
This throttling happens because of a system called EcoQoS. It tells your processor to give less power to apps it thinks you aren’t using. For power users with dozens of tabs, this causes micro-stutters, laggy scrolling, and frustrating delays when switching between sites. It is especially annoying for desktop users who have no battery to worry about but still deal with the performance hit as if they were on a low-battery laptop.
The Classic Shortcut Fix
The most direct way to reclaim your speed has historically been a simple shortcut hack. This method attempts to tell Chrome to ignore the system’s eco-requests entirely. To try this, first close Chrome completely. Right-click your Chrome desktop icon and select Properties. In the Shortcut tab, find the Target field. Click at the very end of the line, add a single space, and paste this command: --disable-features=UseEcoQoSForBackgroundProcess.
After you click Apply and OK, relaunch Chrome using that specific shortcut. In many versions of Windows 11, this will immediately remove that green leaf and let your CPU treat Chrome as a high-priority task again.
The Reality
As we move through 2026, many users are finding that the simple shortcut hack above is becoming less reliable as Google and Microsoft update their code. If you have applied the fix and still see that stubborn green leaf, you may need to use a third-party tool like Process Lasso. This software allows you to create a permanent rule that forces chrome.exe to stay in a normal priority state, effectively overriding the operating system’s attempts to throttle it.
Another internal option is to check Chrome’s own Performance settings. While it won’t stop Windows from being aggressive, turning off Chrome’s built-in Memory Saver can sometimes prevent the browser from “giving up” and allowing the OS to put tabs into a deep sleep. Reclaiming your browser speed is often a battle against your own operating system, but these steps ensure you stay in the driver’s seat.
