Chrome on Mac: solving the “this browser is managed by your organization” message.

The other day i had this message in my chrome settings: “your browser is managed by your organization”. well, it was actually in german language, so it’s more like this one:

starting with chrome version 73 this warning comes up if one or more of chromes built-in policies differ from the default settings.

so you google the problem and you may find some solutions … for windows! (gasp) — or you come across the ‘solution’ to simply suppress the message without fixing the real problem…

most of us are not part of a browser-managing organization. therefore it would be nice to see which policy elements are set. you can see them with the browser-internal url:

chrome://policy

this should bring up something like this:

here we go again… wasn’t it months ago when you were fed up with that chrome cloud printing dialog?

you wanted apples’ standard dialog window with chrome! you wanted back control!! you wanted reven… – whatever!

so you updated the policy above (DisablePrintPreview=true) and lived happily ever after since… until now: “your browser is being managed by someone else!” – you want to get rid of that message, for zarquon’s sake!

the thing is, when you set the policy element back to “false”, this still counts as a modified policy.

you can set the propery back with this command in a terminal window and restarting chrome:

defaults write com.google.Chrome DisablePrintPreview -bool false

…and guess what shows:

grrrr..

ok, so setting the property to “false” obviously leads nowhere. the trick is, to delete the property like this:

defaults delete com.google.Chrome DisablePrintPreview

et abracadabra: after a chrome restart your browser belongs to you again. no evil corp controlling whatever sleazy (or not) policies are set.

jokes aside: this method is a good way to see if this policy you deleted is actually the reason for the nefarious message. if the message persists after deleting the policy, there’s still another policy active.

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