Edit: I've hopefully found a viable (though cumbersome) workaround to this issue. I've updated the bottom of this post with that information.

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So I have a handful of websites that I keep open at all times on one of my monitors. I want a separate window and corresponding taskbar icon for each one, so I use Chrome's "More tools > Add to desktop" feature on each of the websites.

This feature of Chrome creates a windowed version of a website without an address bar, which basically acts like an application distinct from Chrome itself. It also puts a shortcut (using the website's icon) on the desktop. So if you use this feature on several different websites, you get separate and distinct windows and shortcuts for each one. If you pin these shortcuts to the taskbar, they work just like pinned shortcuts for any other program (e.g. Excel). Very useful.

To get these shortcuts onto my DisplayFusion taskbar on the appropriate monitor, I go to DisplayFusion's "Multi-monitor taskbar > Shortcuts > Edit shortcuts" and create a new shortcut for each website. An example of the shortcut data looks like this:



For the icon, I navigate to the directory where Chrome's "Add to desktop" feature places the .ico file for its shortcut, and I select it.

This was all working great. I had six shortcuts on the monitor in question, and they stayed there and worked as expected. I could identify and switch between windows easily.

Then I added a seventh shortcut, and all hell broke loose. Everything looks fine if none of the windows are open, but as soon as I click any of the seven shortcuts, a couple of the shortcuts will suddenly disappear and now there are only five. The window I've opened often has the wrong icon as well.

Ideas? I'm ready to buy this tool if I can get this working properly.

Update: It no longer works with only six shortcuts, either. I've also noticed that when I click into "Multi-monitor taskbar > Shortcuts > Edit shortcuts", they're not in the same order I've saved them in.

Update #2: I tried using the "Add website" option in the DisplayFusion "Edit shortcuts" window instead, but that isn't going to work. Firstly, the window it opens has an address bar, and there's nowhere to enter flags to make it run without one. But I could get over that... The bigger problem is that when I click one of the pinned shortcuts, it launches a regular Chrome browser window in a new, separate slot on the taskbar using a regular Chrome browser icon. In other words, if I have these websites pinned to the taskbar and I click their icons to open them, I end up getting seven additional unmarked, jumbled up Chrome icons on the taskbar, and I have to identify and interact with those unmarked icons instead of my pinned shortcuts to switch between windows. Ugh...

Update #3: I seem to have gotten this working... it's definitely a pain, but I'll post this in case it helps anyone. Here's what I did from start to finish:

1. For each website you want to pin, go to the website in Chrome. Navigate to your dashboard (or whatever page you want the pinned shortcut to open, which might just be the homepage) and in the top right of Google Chrome, click the three dots icon and choose "More tools > Add to desktop".

2. After doing this for each website, you should have separate shortcuts on your desktop for each of them. Open them all up, and you should now have separate windows open for each website.

3. Move all of those windows over to the specific monitor where you want to pin them to the taskbar.

4. Once the windows are on the monitor where you want to pin them to the taskbar, their icons should be visible on the taskbar. Right click each of them and pin them to the taskbar.

5. All the icons will suddenly be replaced by a generic Chrome icon. To fix this, right click on the DisplayFusion taskbar and select "Multi-monitor taskbar > Shortcuts > Edit shortcuts". Now do the following for each shortcut:

5a. Select a shortcut from the list.

5b. Click "Icon > Set custom icon". To find the icon, right-click on the ORIGINAL DESKTOP ICON that Chrome placed on your desktop when you used the "Add to desktop" feature. Select "Properties" and in the properties window select "Change Icon" which will show you the location of the icon. Now you can navigate to that location in the DisplayFusion "Edit shortcuts" window and set the icon properly.

5c. Now you need to add command line arguments to the shortcut in DisplayFusion, or it won't open correctly next time. Again, look in the properties of the original desktop icon placed on your desktop by Chrome to find the command line arguments. You'll see something like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --profile-directory=Default --app-id=fhdfojooelbrdfctpdeomrnginxhoyiw

The part starting with --profile will be the command line arguments. In this example it would be:

--profile-directory=Default --app-id=fhdfojooelbrdfctpdeomrnginxhoyiw

So in your DisplayFusion "Edit shortcuts" window, select the corresponding shortcut and click "Edit," and then paste in the command line arguments and save.

5d. Repeat steps 5a-5c for each of your shortcuts to fix the icons and enter the command line arguments.

To sum up, this is a huge pain but it seems to have worked. I restarted my computer and the pinned shortcuts are still in their correct locations, and they still open correctly with no weird glitches.

I would definitely like to see this overall issue addressed in an update to the DisplayFusion software (if it hasn't already been addressed in one of the beta releases). Chrome's "Add to desktop" feature is an extremely useful tool for the same productivity-minded people who are DisplayFusion's target market. The custom Chrome windows that this tool produces should ideally be just as easy to add to the DisplayFusion taskbar as any other window.