You will also notice that the option to “Open as windows” was also in that right click menu from the Google Apps page. Check your preference and click the Create button. A window will open asking if you want Start Menu and/or Desktop shortcuts. For taskbar Pinning: Right click icon showing on taskbar and select Pin to Taskbar. This should open the webpage in a new window (if it doesn’t go to step 8). Check Open as window and press Create button. Right click the item you want to shortcut (yes, I just used shortcut as a verb) and select Create Shortcut. Click menu (three dots) More Tools Create shortcut. In Chrome go to Apps (in your shortcut bar if open otherwise type chrome://apps/ in the address bar. In the pop-up Create Shortcut window, you can change the name for the shortcut, and click Create button to create a desktop shortcut for this website. Click the three-dot icon at the upper-right corner, click More tools and click Create shortcut. If you want to create the Application shortcuts to Gmail, or other major Google services then you will need to go to the Google Apps page first. Open the target website in Google Chrome browser. It turns out that the shortcuts almost always do work EXCEPT when the Application Shortcut already exists as is the case for Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts. This article was originally such a solution. This is very frustrating and users have been complaining and posting help on the Internet on this issue going back several years with various solutions that often work only partially, or are more complex than users care to deal with. This desktop shortcut often fails and instead of opening the page the user intended to open it opens a Chrome browser window to the default settings and page. When users create shortcuts to the current page by clicking menu > More Tools > Create Shortcut with or without checking the “Open as Window” option the desktop shortcut is supposed to function as a browser tab without the browser features and open the page in a way that looks more like it was a stand-alone application. It seems that the problem was not Microsoft’s and the solution offered was not the best option.Īpplication Shortcuts or shortcuts to sites where you can open as a window are convenient for Gmail and Calendar as it helps find these on the taskbar without having to sort through tabs in various Chrome browser windows to find these often used sites. When I originally posted this article I blamed Microsoft for Chrome Shortcuts not working.

Chrome create shortcut open as window