Google Chrome: This setting is enforced by your administrator

Question

I recently updated my Chrome browser and noticed something very weird. Many fields in the Settings have been disabled. "This setting is enforced by your administrator" appears next to many fields including my saved passwords section (which I need to look up one my old passwords for a website).

Anyway, I've googled this problem on the internet many times, and I haven't been able to find a viable solution.

How do I get rid of this admin lock?

p.s. I'm connected to Chrome with my Google account.

Answer 1

I found a better solution on the Chrome product forums by a user called Gary. The original thread is here.

Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\GroupPolicy

Open each subdirectory there and change the *.pol files to *.sav, E.g. registry.pol becomes registry.sav.

Hit Windows-Key + R, type the following in the box and hit enter

reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Google\Chrome

In the command promt window that opens type: Yes and press Enter.

Restart Google Chrome and check whether you can change the search engine.

Answer 2

Try to use this solution:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome

Run regedit, Delete the key, then restart Chrome.

Answer 3

(MacOS) I got this issue after getting some malware that was forcing me to use WeKnow as a search engine. To fix this on MacOs I followed these steps

1. Go to System Preferences, then check if there's an icon named Profiles.

2. Remove AdminPrefs profile

3. Change default search engine settings, Restart Chrome

The above partially helped (I still had WeKnow as my home page). After that I followed these steps:

1. Type chrome://policy/ to see the policies. You cannot change them there

2. Copy paste this into your terminal

defaults write com.google.Chrome HomepageIsNewTabPage -bool false

defaults write com.google.Chrome NewTabPageLocation -string "https://www.google.com/"

defaults write com.google.Chrome HomepageLocation -string "https://www.google.com/"

defaults delete com.google.Chrome DefaultSearchProviderSearchURL

defaults delete com.google.Chrome DefaultSearchProviderNewTabURL

defaults delete com.google.Chrome DefaultSearchProviderName

I've also ran a scan of my system with Avast antivirus that has detected some malware

Answer 4

Actually, I've got a bit more precise solution, which might be useful if you don't want to change/delete anything else.

Run regedit, and at the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome key you should have a PasswordManagerEnabled property, which probably is set to 0.

Simply change it to 1.

Edit: I tried it on some other computer and it didn't want to work, so I rebooted my computer, made sure Chrome is closed, then changed it in the registry, and finally it worked. So make sure Chrome is closed when you do this.

Answer 5

for me the default search in chrome was locked by smartsputnik.ru. and deleting all the entries in registry and also resetting and reinstalling chrome did not helped . except the below solution.

1. Delete related key from the registry entry- Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACCHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome
2. Delete file - C:\Windows\System32\GroupPolicy\Machine\registry.pol
3. Restart computer and the problem will be solved

reddit source

Answer 6

In my case, the setting was HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Google\Chrome

I deleted Chrome and everything is fine now.

Answer 7

On Linux, you can get rid of "Managed by your organization" Chrome policies, by removing these directories (as sudo probably):

/etc/opt/chrome/policies
/etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed
/etc/opt/chrome/policies/recommended

Answer 8

Any one on windows 10 Pro , this is for you guys --

1. Open CMD in administrator mode .

2. Paste below code-

   RD /S /Q "%WinDir%\System32\GroupPolicyUsers" 
   RD /S /Q "%WinDir%\System32\GroupPolicy" 
   gpupdate /force
   

3. After few seconds you will see this -

   User Policy update has completed successfully.
   Computer Policy update has completed successfully.
   

4. Now you can change your search engine to whatever you want.

Thank you