Ultimately we probably do not want to expose an option like this in the UI, but it'd be useful to have a flag to force the behavior during experimentation.

(And I know you filed this in response to me saying that we may not want the underlying behavior here on desktop; we definitely want to get to a place where we think we have a solid set of behaviors for everyone, which may be less aggressive about staggering background tabs on desktop than mobile, or more likely tuned based on system resources.)

Oh, I am actually thinking about just doing this in chrome://flags. So it is not really visible in chrome://settings (if I understand correctly). This is probably a good balance between power users and general users. Power users can just reset the flag by himself while general users do not have to be confused from general settings.

Team policy bans long-lived flags; we don't want about:flags to become the "power-user settings" page like Firefox' about:config.  If a flag is in about:flags, it should either graduate to a launched feature or be removed from the product within a reasonable (e.g. six month) time window.

We have not always managed to hold the line on this, but we're trying hard :)

+1 to pkasting comments in #4. A flag is fine during experimentation, but by no means should it live beyond this. We should aim to make the feature "just work" for everyone (well, a very very high percentage of people), and kill it if we don't hit that bar.

That sounds good to me. I think having good communication with user would alleviate this, e.g., fixing the tab strip UI and having a temporary banner if browser stops loading background tabs instead of delaying. 

Marking this as WontFix.