How to hide or remove the extension icon (puzzle piece) in Google Chrome

You can hide any extension icon in Google Chrome by right-clicking it on the toolbar and selecting Unpin. The icon moves into the Extensions menu, the puzzle piece button next to the address bar, and the extension keeps working. Chrome has no setting to remove the puzzle piece button itself, so to make an icon disappear completely you remove the extension through More > Extensions > Manage extensions.

This guide explains what the puzzle piece icon is, how to hide, show, rearrange and remove extension icons, and what happened to the old tricks for hiding the Extensions button.

What the puzzle piece icon in Chrome is

The puzzle piece icon in Chrome is the Extensions button, the menu that lists every installed extension. It sits on the right side of the toolbar, next to the address bar, and looks like a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Google's help documentation calls it the Extensions icon and uses it as the place where hidden extensions are listed.

Opening the menu shows each extension with a pin button. Pinned extensions get their own icon on the toolbar; unpinned ones stay reachable from the menu only. The menu also links to Manage extensions, the full extensions page where you can turn extensions on or off, open their options, or remove them.

The icon is part of Chrome, not something an extension added, so seeing it is not a sign of malware. If you spot an extension in the list that you did not install, that is the part worth checking: remove it, and review the Chrome help article on removing unwanted ads, pop-ups and malware.

How to hide an extension icon from the Chrome toolbar

Hiding an extension icon in Chrome means unpinning it, which takes two clicks and does not disable the extension.

1. Right-click the extension's icon on the Chrome toolbar.
2. Select Unpin.

The icon disappears from the toolbar and is listed in the Extensions menu instead. You can also unpin from inside the menu: click the puzzle piece icon and select the pin button next to the extension so it is no longer highlighted.

Unpinning only changes the toolbar layout. The extension stays installed and enabled, so content blockers, password managers and similar tools keep running in the background. This is the right option when you use an extension but rarely click its icon.

How to show or rearrange extension icons in Chrome

To show a hidden extension icon in Chrome again, pin it from the Extensions menu.

1. Click the puzzle piece icon on the toolbar.
2. Find the extension in the list.
3. Select the pin button next to it.

The icon returns to the toolbar. Google notes that some extensions do not offer this option, which is often the case for extensions that an organization manages on work or school devices. If your browser shows a "managed by your organization" notice, read what Chrome's managed browser message means before changing anything.

To rearrange pinned icons, drag an extension's icon to a new spot on the toolbar. Keeping the two or three extensions you use daily pinned, and the rest unpinned, gives a clean toolbar without losing any functionality.

How to remove an extension icon completely

The only way to remove an extension icon from Chrome completely is to uninstall the extension. Use one of these two paths:

• From the toolbar: right-click the extension's icon and select Remove from Chrome, then confirm.
• From the menu: open the More menu (three dots, top right), select Extensions, then Manage extensions, select Remove on the extension and confirm.

The Manage extensions page also has an on and off switch for each extension. Turning an extension off stops it from running and takes its icon off the toolbar until you turn it back on, which is useful for tools you only need now and then. You can open the same page directly by typing chrome://extensions into the address bar; ghacks keeps a list of internal Chrome URLs and what they do.

Can you hide the Extensions puzzle button itself?

No, current Chrome versions have no built-in setting to hide the puzzle piece Extensions button. Google's extension help covers hiding individual extension icons only, and the button stays on the toolbar as the entry point to the Extensions menu.

Two workarounds existed in the past. When Google introduced the menu as an experiment in 2020, a flag on the chrome://flags page could turn it off; that flag was removed. A command-line switch, --disable-features=ExtensionsToolbarMenu, added to the Chrome shortcut target, then worked in Chrome 87, but reader reports in 2021 already said the puzzle piece stayed visible with it. The switch is undocumented, so do not expect it to work in a current build. If you want to experiment with Chrome's launch options anyway, see how Chrome command-line switches work and remove the switch again if nothing changes.

Here is what each option does:

FAQ

Related: how Chrome flags work, useful Chrome command-line switches, Chrome internal URLs