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How to remove the ‘You’ User Menu from Chrome?

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Chromium team has enabled the new avatar menu and testing it for a while now, if you’re using Chrome Canary or dev. version, you can notice the new ‘You’ menu button on top right, next to window controls, which is the default profile or user menu that lets you switch to another user with ‘Switch Person’ option or enter incognito mode with ‘Go incognito’ option (check the screenshot below).

If you’re the only one person using your computer and Chrome browser, and not created any separate user accounts, then space it occupies at the end of title bar can be an obstacle to open new tabs if you’ve already many tabs open(the user menu that opens offering options is quite big and annoying, it should have been much smaller), don’t want that? Here is how you can disable or turn that off.

new You user menu Chrome non-signed

 

UPDATE: Chrome 44: How to disable User Menu

How to Prevent Chrome from Adding Desktop Shortcuts for New User Accounts

Turning off or removing the You user menu in Chrome

1. Visit chrome://flags page

2. Find ‘Enable new avatar menu’ flag and select ‘Disabled‘ from drop down and restart the browser.

Google: User menu is valuable like the home button even if you don’t use it

Google Employee working on new user menu for Chrome said in a thread ” we’re rolling out the user menu as part of a broader initiative for Chrome Identity. We have several goals for the change, including

Making it more clear to users who are signed into Chrome that they are, in fact, signed into Chrome
More visible access to incognito mode
Adding a layer of abstraction to profiles to make the notion of person separation more apparent (i.e. one person, one profile)
The introduction of Guest Mode as a better solution for allowing others to use your computer temporarily
Like the home button, we feel the user menu is a piece of UI which is still valuable, even if you don’t find yourself using it on a daily basis. ”

How to Get Chromebook’s Guest Browsing in Google Chrome?

Note: Please backup your bookmarks and other data like history before doing this.

What’s your take on the new user menu? Have you found it useful or unnecessary? Has the instructions mentioned above worked for you in getting rid of it? Let us know in the comments.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Brian says

    Thanks. placement was annoying. Kept clicking that accidentally instead of minimize. and for those who don’t poke around much. put chrome://flags in your browser to get the flags page.

    • Venkat eswarlu says

      Brian, welcome. FYI, visiting about:flags takes you to the chrome://flags page also, thanks for your comment.

    • Jeff Hill says

      I agree! The placement of the “You” button is not only most unfortunate, it is Non-Standard (name another application with *any* button next to the Min/Max/Close buttons!). I don’t know how many times I’ve hit it by mistake.

      I am using “47.0.2526.106 m”. The “//flags” reference no longer works – the “avatar” option isn’t present because the functionality is now in production. I thought perhaps the enable/disable option had made it into Settings, but it’s not there either.

      Suggestions:
      1. Move this functionality to the Menu where it arguably belongs.
      2. Move the button to the tab bar, under the Close button. It so small now that it really won’t interfere with crating new tabs.
      3. Give us a setting to enable/disable the button.
      4. Change the icon so the horizontal bar representing the “shoulders” doesn’t mimic the appearance of the Minimize button icon.

  2. Chase says

    For some reason my Chrome has completely reset without my asking and that User menu sometimes shows up. How do I get all my history, bookmarks, saved passwords and top sites back and NOT bring the user thing back? I don’t know what happened or what I did to make my Chrome reset but I want it back. Do you have any way to fix that?

    • Venkat eswarlu says

      Chase, you can disable the user menu by disabling ‘Enable new avatar menu’flag in the chrome://flags page, I don’t know there is a way to bring lost bookmarks and other data.

  3. John Connell says

    I think I could like it except
    1. both my work and home profiles have the same name and
    2. I liked the one click to change profiles – I would like it if the name tab had the other profile more immediately accessible than first necessarily clicking on ‘change user’

    • Venkat eswarlu says

      Danny,
      That menu is occupying lot of space, seems most user don’t like it. Thanks for your comment danny, you’re welcome.

  6. Jaime Kutcher says

    That button is in an extremely poor location. I did get it to go away per the instructions, thank you. But now every time I open chrome it opens all the tabs I had open when I closed it, instead of using the home page that I have selected in the settings. It seems to default to the ‘continue where you left off’ setting. Any ideas?

    • Venkat eswarlu says

      Ensure ‘Open the new tab page’ is selected and under appearance, check show ‘home button’, click change next to New Tab Page and choose open this page and type the URL, click OK, see if that works for you.

  7. Joel says

    I don’t think this works anymore now that they’ve rolled out this “feature” to normal releases.

  10. Nathan says

    Thank you so much for this tutorial. I saw this user menu pop up on my Mac a few weeks back, and just the other day it popped up after Chrome updated itself on my main PC. I’m glad to see there’s a simple way to get rid of it, as I see no use for it in my personal setup.

  11. Ram says

    Thank you!! Great post ! When I got rid of this feature, it also blew away all my search history, bookmarks etc. Had to retrieve backup. Nonetheless, no more annoying “People” feature & id tracking. Thank you.

    • Venkat eswarlu says

      You’re welcome ram, didn’t know about loss of search history and bookmark issue, will update the post with that information If I am able to reproduce on my computer with Chrome.

  12. Townpiper says

    I already don’t like the fact that “incognito” renders “safe search” useless. Now this feature throws it right up there in the forefront. Besides, I don’t need a certain user designated.

  14. Jenny says

    Thank you… I might like the feature on one of my computers with multiple users, but the placement is horrible. Kept hitting it when I meant to minimize. Very annoying. Glad there’s a way to turn it off.

    • Venkat eswarlu says

      You’re welcome Jenny, let us hope Google keeps that flag for needed users for a long time.

  15. Table says

    I turned off all the right flags and the YOU menu is still there. Now its moved over to the top left and is an avatar rather than a button.
    Looks like Google want to force this feature in as the flags now don’t work and don’t totally turn it off. (April 3rd 2015).
    Any more ideas to get rid of this thing?

    • Venkat eswarlu says

      Still working for me, I’ve only said to disable one flag that is chrome://flags/#enable-new-avatar-menu, you’re talking about multiple number of flags, please check on your end once again.

  16. Table says

    Oh wait, … I did manage to get the You menu (user menu) off Chrome. I removed it in the settings, under “people”. However, what I didn’t know (and it didn’t warm me) that I lose ALL my bookmarks, cookies, history, the whole lot. : ( Aaaaarrrrrrrgggghhhhhh!!!!!

    • Venkat eswarlu says

      I didn’t experienced that, when you sign into your Google account they may come back. Will update the post.

  19. Gabrio says

    this seems to be back now – there was one of those “silent” Chrome updates, disabling the flag now doesn’t change anything :(..

    i’d like to remove it, it’s useless. Version 44.0.2403.89 m

  20. Natasha says

    Hi VENKAT,

    I couldn’t get to find chrome://flags/#enable-new-avatar-menu.
    Is it the column was removed ?

    Here I get chrome://flags/
    But it was disappeared. How can I to do now ?