A few minutes ago, I decided to see if I could cast Chrome to a TV. When I clicked the Chrome menu button, I spied something I hadn’t seen before at the bottom of the menu: “Managed by your organization.”

My Chrome browser suddenly said “Managed by your organization”…Except, it shouldn’t have been

The thing is, this laptop has never been managed by an organization, nor is my Google account. Both are, and have always been, mine to do with as I please. And if there’s one thing I don’t like is for my my technology to start telling me I’m not the boss. 😡

So, I started searching around to see what may be the cause of this. After scouring several forums and tech press posts about this, I was able to piece together why Chrome was saying this, and more importantly, how to make it stop sayng my browser was managed by someone other than me.

Why Did My Chrome Start Saying This? If any of the available policies are set for your Chrome browser, it will show the “Managed by an organization” message. Apparently, up until a certain version (I read conflicting reports of the exact version that started it), only certain policies would trigger the warning. Now, however, any set policies will cause it to show up.

How Can I Check What Policies I Have Enabled? I learned there’s a handy Chrome URL that will show you all managed policies that are enabled. If you type chrome://policy into your address bar, it will show you all the policies applied and what the value of each policy is.

Type chrome://policy into your address bar to see all enabled policies

What Policies Did I Have Enabled? I only had one policy enabled: ExtensionInstallSources and it had no value set. According to some of the stuff I read, malware can set policies to allow malicious extensions to be installed, but ExtensionInstallSources is not one of the bad ones (or so one poster said). And since there was no value set, this policy had zero effect. So I left it at that and didn’t try to remove it, right? OF COURSE NOT.

How’d I Get Rid of the ExtensionInstallSources Policy? You would think there’d be a delete option within the chrome://policy page since I am the one who installed Chrome on this machine, but alas, there isn’t. Luckily, I figured out where the Windows registry key was to banish this foul beast (er…the menu item I don’t want to see anymore).

Launch regedit and navigate to the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\

There will be one key in here for each policy enabled. As you can see in my case, the only subkey I had was ExtensionInstallSources and it was empty with no values.

The Windows registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\ will show you all the enabled policies.

I right clicked the ExtensionInstallSources subkey and deleted it. When I restarted Chrome…HURRAY! The “Managed by your organization” message was gone! I will now be able to sleep peacefully tonight.

I’m assuming you can delete any Chrome policy using this method, but this is the only one I’ve actually tested out. Good luck!