How to fix -Taskbar won’t hide in fullscreen-
How to fix "Taskbar won’t hide in fullscreen"?
Taskbar won’t hide in Windows 10 | Taskbar in full screen | How to auto hide the taskbar
Hiding the taskbar in the fullscreen mode makes a strip of some more room and the appearance shifts to an overall clean look. The desktop looks neat and tidy. But many of us are facing the problem that the taskbar won’t hide automatically in Windows 10.
Now stop thinking more about that and read till the end. We’ll see every cause which is preventing that taskbar from hiding and a solution for each of those causes.
The taskbar is an important piece lying there at the very bottom of your desktop (At least, by default). It shows all the open windows and some tasks going and you can switch from a Window to other using the taskbar. In addition to this, it has got the start button and a quick search bar. Go to a little right and there you’ll find some tiny buttons for some system settings. You can adjust the volume, manage the devices connected as well as be aware of all the balloon notifications so that you don’t miss even a single one.
Yes, the taskbar has some cool features and shortcuts but these are what sometimes makes it uncomfortable to have it in its place.. Even in fullscreen. Its expected that the taskbar hides automatically as soon as it senses a less frequent use and should pop up as soon as the pointer crawls over it. The Windows has got an option of hiding the taskbar on its own. It just needs to be enabled.
So what to do if it still doesn’t hide?
There can actually be a lot of causes contributing to its failure to auto hide and so we have many solutions for you to check out.
- Change the taskbar settings :
So the first thing may be that you haven’t yet enabled the auto hide setting. In fact, a lot of people are even unaware of the fact that it can be auto hidden. Follow the simple steps to make that taskbar go down automatically.
- Go to the settings, click on personalization and then click on the taskbar.
- There are actually two options to manage the auto hiding of the taskbar, which are Auto hide taskbar in desktop mode and auto hide the taskbar in tablet mode. Choose the proper mode.
- When this is enabled, the taskbar hides automatically by Windows and you can access it by moving the mouse pointer to the taskbar area.
Verify the settings once again. This should work fine most of the time, but sometimes the taskbar doesn’t go on its own and you notice it. Don’t worry, try the options below.
2. Restart the Windows Explorer :
Seriously, this method is a must try for the taskbar problems and works magically in most cases. To restart the Windows Explorer, follow the steps below :
- Open the Windows Task Manager (Press ctrl+shift+esc)
- At first, it may show only a few details. To locate the Windows Explorer in that, click on More Details.
- Click on the Windows Explorer and then click restart.
This process of restarting the Explorer can also be done using command prompt and if the problem is frequent, it’d be better to make a script for that.
- In the command prompt, type taskkill /im explorer.exe /f
- Now the next command you have to type is explorer.
- Then type exit.
Just try clicking anywhere on the desktop. Also make sure the mouse isn’t on the taskbar region. Sometimes, little things are the ones to cause the problem and we should follow a bottom up principle to solve them.
3. Click on the search bar and then click somewhere on the desktop : I know it doesn’t sound like something technical but believe, this technique works magically for many users. So all you have to do is,
- Click on the search button on the taskbar. A menu will pop up.
- Now as that menu had popped up, click anywhere on the desktop and done!
The taskbar should automatically hide on its own from now.
4. Close the messaging and similar apps: While it may sound strange, but a taskbar doesn’t hide if some app on that wants to draw your attention to it.
See, whenever you receive a message, the icon of the messaging app changes so as to display the no. of messages in a simple glance and when the icon changes, the taskbar remains visible. Background apps which aren’t visible for most of the time can also be a reason for this.
So you may consider closing the apps which remain active in the background for the time you’re full screen.
5. Disable the small icons on the taskbar : We have seen that sometimes, the app icons change as soon as some changes take place in them. The solution was just to close them. But sometimes, this may be caused by the program icons that are not visible.
Some of them are hidden behind the small arrow at the right side of taskbar. So I would suggest you to disable them too. It may also be the case that you linked to one app and the taskbar refused to hide thereafter. Simply click on the app and the taskbar would hide thereafter. Set proper preferences for such small apps to be displayed.
- Open settings and click on personalization. Click on task manager in that.
- Under the notification area there, click on ‘Select which apps to display on taskbar‘.
- Select the option to show all the apps in the notification area.
- By doing this, it’ll be easy to identify the app which starts frequently and is causing the taskbar to remain visible all the time.
- Once you identify the culprit, I suggest you to disable the notification from that app. After this, there’s no need to show all the apps on taskbar.
6. Try Windows Group policy editor : Please note that the features referred to in this point are only available in the Windows Pro and Enterprise versions.
- Click on the Windows key and type in it gpedit.msc. and press enter.
- Go to the user configuration. In that, you can go to the start menu and taskbar section and lock all the taskbar settings so that they don’t change by some mistake.
- In the same menu, turn off the balloon notifications.
- You’ll also find an option to turn off the automatic promotion of notification icons to the taskbar. Turn off that option and now the frequently starting apps won’t be promoted to the taskbar.
- Also go to the notifications menu there and turn off the toast notifications.
7. A special program to hide the taskbar :
A program has been recently launched by the Windows Club to hide the taskbar using a hotkey. This is available for Windows 7,8 and 10. It’d be interesting to see that the program hides the taskbar but not the start button! (I know it’ll look strange!).
You can download that key from the official website of the Windows Club. After installation, all you have to do is just to press ctrl+esc to toggle the taskbar visibility.
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