What Is Microsoft Edge’s Efficiency Mode (and How Can You Enable It)?

Microsoft Edge is a pretty good default browser. Now that it’s made on the same platform as Chrome, it’s fast, versatile, and efficient; Microsoft has put in a lot of effort to make Edge less resource-intensive when compared to Chrome. But for some computers with older hardware, Edge can still be a struggle to use. If Edge is slowing down your computer — or if it’s draining too much battery — you can try switching to its “Efficiency” mode.

How does the Efficiency Mode (or Performance Mode) on Edge work?

Essentially, Microsoft Edge artificially reduces the CPU and GPU usage when you enable the efficiency mode. This is triggered automatically when your device battery is low, but you can also enable it from settings any time you want. Once enabled, Edge will turn up the heat on its Sleeping Tabs feature. Any open tab that hasn’t been used in the past five minutes is instantly put to sleep, so it isn’t using any resources.

How to enable and customise the Efficiency Mode

To enable this feature, click the three-dotted Menu button and go to Settings. From the sidebar, choose the “System and Performance” option, and from the Optimise Performance section, click the dropdown next to the “Turn on efficiency mode when” option.

We would suggest you use the “Always” option to make the most out of this feature; you can also choose to only enable it when your device is not connected to a power source.

Next, make sure that the Sleeping Tabs feature is enabled. If you don’t want certain websites to go into sleep mode, you can add them as an exception from the “Never put these sites to sleep” section.

How to quickly enable or disable the efficiency mode

If you need to enable the efficiency mode for a while, you can do it from the menu button itself — in fact, you can even pin the feature to the toolbar. Click the three-dotted Menu button and choose the “Performance” option.

From the popup, you can click the Pin icon to pin the feature to the taskbar. And from the drop-down, you can quickly enable or disable the feature.