Enabling High Efficiency Mode in Google Chrome with Updated ADMX Templates

If you’re managing a network and want to push out settings to all your machines, updating your Google Chrome ADMX templates is essential. In this guide, I’ll walk you through how I updated the templates to enable the High Efficiency Mode in Google Chrome using Group Policy.

Why Update ADMX Templates?

The main reason for this update was to enable High Efficiency Mode within Google Chrome. I needed this setting to be pushed out via Group Policy across my network. But, when I tried to locate it in the existing Chrome policy settings, it wasn’t there, which indicated that I was using outdated templates. Here’s the process I followed.

Step 1. Accessing Group Policy Management

Start by opening Group Policy Management and locating my existing Google Chrome policy. Within the Computer Configuration settings, I went into Administrative Templates, then Google, and finally Google Chrome. Sorting through the settings, I couldn’t find the “Enable High Efficiency Mode” option, which prompted me to check the version of the ADMX templates

Step 2. Checking the Current ADMX Template Version

To figure out how old my ADMX templates were, I navigated to my domain controller. Although it’s not best practice to work directly on the domain controller, for this environment, it was the most convenient choice. Here’s what I did:

• I opened Run (Win + R) and entered \\DC01 (this should be your domain) to access the system volume.
• Then, I navigated to Policies > PolicyDefinitions and located the chrome.admx and google.admx files.
• After checking the “Date Modified” field, I realized my templates were from 2020 — outdated by four years

Step 3. Backing Up Existing ADMX Templates

Before proceeding with the update, I created a backup of the existing templates:

• I created a folder on the desktop called Google ADMX Backup.
• I copied the current google.admx and chrome.admx templates, along with the related language files, into this backup folder.

Step 4. Downloading the Latest ADMX Templates (video)