Your browser is managed

What the message means

The bottom of the ⋮ menu gets a Managed by your organization item, and the top of Settings, the About Sverk page and the History, Downloads, Bookmarks and Extensions pages show the line “Your browser is managed by your organization”. The menu item and the link in that line open chrome://management, which says what an administrator can do.

The message appears when at least one Sverk policy is set on the computer. Policies set for Google Chrome or Chromium do not apply to Sverk: it reads only its own.

Before version 155.0.8059.116, Sverk wrongly named the first profile “Work”, like an organization's profile, although nobody managed the browser. After the update the name came back by itself, unless you had changed it. If it did not, rename the profile in Settings → Profile → Customize profile.

Where policies come from

Sverk policies are kept in the Windows registry: under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Sverk for everyone on the computer, and under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Sverk for the current Windows user. Sverk writes nothing there itself: policies are set by an organization's administrator or by a program installed on the computer.

Every policy is listed at chrome://policy with its name, its value and “Applies to”: “Machine” if it is under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, “Current user” if it is under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. Policies from the registry have “Platform” as their source.

The subkey HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Sverk\Update holds the Sverk updater's policies. If they turn updates off, the About Sverk page says “Updates are disabled by your administrator.”

On a computer that is not in an organization's domain and not managed by it through MDM, Sverk does not follow policies that change the home and startup pages, the new tab page and the search engine, and does not install extensions from outside the Chrome Web Store by policy. Such policies still appear at chrome://policy and still turn the managed message on.

If you did not expect it

If the computer is yours and no organization manages it, the policies were written by a program installed on it: Sverk does not set them. A policy can, for example, install an extension from the Chrome Web Store that cannot be turned off or removed on the Extensions page.

1. Open chrome://policy and see which policies are set and where — in the “Applies to” column.
2. Uninstall programs you did not install, or ones that appeared together with these policies, from the list of installed apps in Windows.
3. Restart Sverk and open chrome://policy again. If no policies are left, it says “No policies set”, and Managed by your organization is gone from the menu.

If the policies are still there, remove them in Registry Editor. Do this only on your own computer. The key holds nothing but Sverk policies: Sverk's settings and data are kept elsewhere.

1. Press Win+R, type regedit and press Enter; allow Registry Editor to make changes.
2. Paste HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Sverk into the address bar of Registry Editor and press Enter. For policies that apply to “Current user”, use HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Sverk.
3. Right-click the Sverk key, choose Export and save the file: it is a copy of the key in case you need it.
4. Right-click Sverk again, choose Delete and confirm.
5. In Sverk, click Reload policies at chrome://policy, or restart Sverk.

If the policies come back, the program that writes them is still on the computer.

At work

On a work computer, Sverk policies are set by your organization's administrator, and questions about them go to the administrator: what may be changed is their decision. What an administrator can do with the browser is listed at chrome://management.

A computer in an organization's domain does not make Sverk managed by itself: the message appears only when Sverk policies are set.

For administrators: Sverk policies have the same names as Chromium's, but Sverk reads them only from SOFTWARE\Policies\Sverk; policies under the Google Chrome and Chromium keys do not apply to it.

Didn't find the answer?

Write to us at support@sverk.ai: what you did, what you expected to see and what you saw. Other topics are in the help contents.