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.