Disabling the Avatar Menu in Google Chrome

I’ve recently noticed a tiny little button show up in the top right hand corner of Chrome next to the “Close”, “Maximize” and “Minimize” buttons. This button is for Google Chromes newish “Avatar Menu”.

It looks like this:
Google Chrome Avatar Menu

Since I don’t typically like new things.. I immediately went looking for a way to make it go away.

That said, you can use Chrome flags to turn off the avatar menu in Google Chrome.

  1. Open the Chrome flags by typing “chrome://flags/” into your Omnibar.
  2. Search through the flags for “Enable the new avatar menu
  3. Select the “Disabled” option and save.
  4. Relaunch the browser.

Kaboosh. The new Avatar menu is gone (for now).

4 thoughts on “Disabling the Avatar Menu in Google Chrome”

  1. I’ve been doing this for over a year, but now the Avatar is back and I can’t get rid of it anymore! I guess Google.com has finally had enough of my belligerence and decided to take things into their own hands.

    1. I know, how horrible that we users want something which works for us. I supposed the Google Chrome team has simply had enough of mad drive to use functional, efficient software.

  2. It seems Google has decided to fully implement this feature now because it is no longer possible to disable it. It is highly annoying but Google ignores that many users dislike it. Hopefully another method to disable it will be discovered soon.

    1. There is a workaround where you can add a string to your shortcut:

      –disable-new-avatar-menu

      There are some articles out there about it. However, in one thread one of the dev’s said that this workaround isn’t long for the world either. It honestly baffles me. The existence of this and many, many other threads/articles/videos should make clear that the “new” method isn’t working for people. When there is a “feature” this commonly reviled, I simply don’t understand the dev’s need to shove it down our throats. It’s not our fault their “upgrade” is slower, cumbersome and at least in the way I need it – dysfunctional.

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