Remove Chrome's Most Visited Icon on Taskbar (not the tabs)

Question

In Windows, when you right click the Chrome startup icon pinned to the task bar, it presents you with a list of pinned sites, and one icon as the "Most Visited" site. In Windows 8 I could delete it with a right click, but in Windows 10 this functionality disappeared.

Sometimes I really don't want that to appear, like on a telco or something. But searching only brings up posts dealing with the "Most Visited" tab, which are relatively easy to change. I included a screenshot where the icon is a link to "Business Insi". Note that I have my taskbar on the left side of my screen which is a bit unusual.

I could find nothing in the registry, but I suspect Chrome doesn't use it.

Update:

I can't believe I have find nothing about this after a couple of months of on and off looking. If anyone can tell me where this is being managed (Chrome? Taskbar code?, Desktop?), it would be a start.

Answer 1

Omkar Sawant provided the following answer at Google Product Forums:

1. Open Taskbar and Start Menu Properties by clicking the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking Appearance and Personalization, and then clicking Taskbar and Start Menu.

2. Click the Start Menu tab, and then do one of the following:

   • To prevent recently opened programs from appearing in the Start menu, clear the Store and display recently opened programs in the Start menu check box.

   • To clear recently opened files in the Jump Lists on the taskbar and Start menu, clear the Store and display recently opened items in the Start menu and the taskbar check box.

3. Click OK.

Answer 2

It's very easy to remove the "recent visited" crap from your Win10 taskbar icons.

Just go to Settings>>Personalization>>Start and uncheck "Show recently opened items in Jump Lists on Start or the Taskbar", this should be the last optinon with an on/off switch on this page.

Answer 3

Unfortunately, I think the answer is that this is not optional, and is based on Chrome's retention of browsing history. Assuming my "before" picture matched the OP's (which isn't strictly true ;)), here is what I did:

...and, here is the result:

I scoured the settings for a way to just turn the history suggestions on the taskbar off, and found nothing. This is the only way I've found of solving the problem. I also found this article on how to fix this problem in previous Windows versions, but the options it references seem to have disappeared in Windows 10.

I had to login to Super User again to finish this post after clearing my history. I would imagine I'll have to login to a lot of sites again, and that as those become marked "frequently visited" by the Google and Microsoft overlords, they will reappear on the taskbar.

Answer 4

In the notification area, right click on the Chrome icon and choose, "Don't run chrome in the background" or something similar to that.

Once I did that, the Chrome icon was no longer in the notification area.

Answer 5

Super easy. Go to Settings>Personalisation>Taskbar>Combine Taskbar Buttons then select 'Always Hide Labels'.

Answer 6

It's not Chrome's fault. It's Windows 10. See this link for the fix. Open settings in Windows 10, not setting in Chrome. https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/3469-turn-off-recent-items-frequent-places-windows-10-a.html