Quick Fix

Fix That Annoying Win10 Taskbar over YouTube Videos in Full Screen

 

 

 

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Affects: Windows (7,8,10)

 

Includes: Chrome Browser, YouTube

 

Read Time: ~ 5 minutes

 

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Let’s set the stage:

 

You’re watching YouTube and decide to set it into full screen mode. So you click that little button and (as expected) the video fills your screen. Except one minor detail:

 

The Windows 10 taskbar is still visible on top of the video.

 

It’s safe to say that this little bug can drive the most patient person insane. Do you enable some magical option in chrome://plugins? Is there some setting in Chrome that you missed? Do you uninstall Flash Player?

 

Well, there are some short answers for most of this which I’ll cover today.

 

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Unpin Chrome

 

The first culprit could simply be a glitch with pinning Chrome to the taskbar. Some suggestions I’ve seen involved removing it from the taskbar and re-pinning it again. I’ve had marginal success with this at best.

 

 

Flash Fire

 

In chrome://plugins you can also check to see if multiple versions of Adobe Flash are enabled. Just hit the Details button on the top right to see. If they are, just disable the ones that aren’t the Pepper player native to Chrome.

 

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Restart Explorer

 

The solution that seems to have worked for me is simply to restart the Windows Explorer process in Task Manager. Seems a little scary for those who never have done this before, but rest assured it’s perfectly safe.

 

 

 

Step One

 

 

 

• Right-Click on your Taskbar
• Select Task Manager

 

 

 

Step Two

 

 

• Locate Windows Explorer in the Task Manager List
• Select it and Click Restart  below

 

 

What This Does

 

Essentially you’ve rebooted the computer without rebooting it.

 

Sometimes the Windows Explorer process gets a little finicky or glitched up depending on what is going on and over what period of time you are running the computer. When things go awry with the taskbar, sometimes you just need a quick restart of the process itself to sort it out.

 

This can also happen due to other factors -

 

• Windows Update
• Registry Errors

 

There is also the possibility that when you boot up the computer, the loading process itself might have messed something up with the shear volume of items vying for attention on Windows Start.

 

In any event, this will give it a fresh start and (hopefully) resume your ability to run YouTube videos in full screen again while using Chrome.

 

Have any additional tips or suggestions?

Feel free to drop them in the comments for others.

 

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