Arrange Your Shelf

The shelf has many of the features you may know from the Windows taskbar. You can even relocate it to the left or right side of the screen, though not the top. Just right-click it and choose your desired location.

Move the shelf to the left or right side of the screen.

The Chrome OS shelf also gives you some flexibility in how you launch apps. You can right-click an app and select to open it by default as a window, pinned tab, or full screen. For example, I tell Gmail to launch in a separate window so it acts like a standalone application.

Chromebook Fullscreen Mode

Immersive fullscreen mode allows you to utilize the full screen of your Chromebook to do your work.  For instance, if you are working on a Doc and you would just like to see the doc itself and no other tabs.  Just get into fullscreen mode and there you go.

It is simple, click on this button

to shift back and forth between regular mode and fullscreen.


In Immersive mode, additional tabs are represented by horizontal bars along the top of the screen. Your shelf is represented by similar bars, so you can still switch between apps in Immersive mode if you don't feel like using one of the many Chrome keyboard shortcuts.