So when I launched Google Chrome web browser this Sunday morning, there was a strange new item in the browser menu – “Managed by Your Organization”. This appears only if the system administrator has made policy related changes about Google Chrome web browser. What happened is that installation of McAfee Antivirus on the Windows PC resulted in making some policy changes for Google Chrome web browser. When we add a new enterprise policy for Chrome, we are going to see “Managed by your organization” in the web browser.
We can see this message in the Google Chrome web browser to see if Chrome is being managed by a system administrator through policies. Another way of finding whether Chrome is being managed is by entering chrome://management/ in the address bar.
But how do we stop managing of the Chrome web browser on a Windows PC? According to Google, we have to remove certain registry keys in the following manner:
- Close all running instances of the Chrome web browser.
- Press Win+R to open the Run dialog. In the Run dialog, type regedit and press Enter.
- In the Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome and delete the Chrome key.
- In the same way, you have to delete the following keys too:
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Chrome
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Google\Chrome
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Google\Update
- After this, restart Windows and then launch Chrome when Windows has started. Now your Chrome web browser should not display any “Managed by your organization” message.
Just like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome allows setting up policies which are stored in the Windows registry. Using these policies. There is a large number of these policies that may force Chrome to do something or force it not t do something. For example, we can prevent the use of spell checking feature in Chrome. With the proper use of these Enterprise policies, we can make Google Chrome safer and more productive.