How to get Chrome favicons to appear in Windows 10 start menu?

Solution 1:

It looks like this issue is caused by a quirk in the standard way Windows 10 picks an icon for a tile. I found the following explanation by "Leo Vr" on the Chrome Help Forum:

The big Google-"icon" on the start-menu and the fact that for Google-apps all "icons" are the same are not caused by a fault, but are "according to spec". With the Windows 10 Threshold 2 update, Microsoft added the possibility to customize the tiles in the start menu a bit. Google uses this feature, which makes some of us unhappy.

This customizing is done by adding a file "VisualElementsManifest.xml" to the directory in which the executable resides. In our case it is the file "chome.VisualElementsManifest.xml".

When you add a program to the start menu, the following happens: - a shortcut for the program is made in the directory "....\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs". - a tile is made, based on this shortcut AND the before mentioned file "VisualElementsManifest.xml". This causes all shortcuts for the program "chrome.exe" to have the same big "icon".

What can we do about this?

• in case the file"VisualElementsManifest.xml" is missing, the icon of the shortcut is used for the tile. In our case that is exactly what we want.
• if we remove (or rename) the file "VisualElementsManifest.xml" at first nothing happens.
• the tile is refreshed however if the shortcut is changed. (It is sufficient if the "lastwritetime" of the shortcut changes).
• so I changed the lastwritetime using "powershell" (present in Windows 10 by default)
• the command for this is: (ls "C:\Users\leo\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Chrome-apps\Google Maps.lnk").lastwritetime = get-date
• of course the name of the shortcut needs to be changed to the one specific for your case.

This way I got the Google-apps icons to look the way I wanted. I hope it works for you as well.

"tfenster" in the same thread also provides this handy PowerShell script (which I had to modify slightly to get working) for updating all shortcuts in the Chrome Apps folder:

foreach ($file in (ls "~\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Chrome Apps")) {
     $file.LastWriteTime = get-date
}

Solution 2:

Here's an easier method that should work for most people:

I like Charles Roper's answer but it isn't helpful for those of us who don't have experience using the Windows Powershell.

(credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISvelu_dym4)

Basically, you create a copy of chrome.exe, rename it to chrome2.exe and then point all of your start menu shortcuts to this new exe file.

Once you click Apply your icons will display correctly.

Here's a step by step:

1. Right click on one of your culprit icons in the start menu and go to More > Open file location
2. From there, right click on the icon and select Properties
3. Click the Open File Location button
4. Click chrome.exe and press ctrl+c to copy and then ctrl+v to paste a new copy
5. Rename this new copy to chrome2.exe
6. Go back to your start menu and again go to More > Open file location on one of the icons
7. Right click on each of your chrome app shortcuts, select Properties and change the Target field to point to chrome2.exe instead of chrome.exe

Note that there's no need to create a new copy of chrome.exe for each shortcut; just the one chrome2.exe will do.

Good luck!