Remove the Chrome Bell Icon from the OS X Menu Bar

I’ve got a lot of icons in my menu bar; too many, in fact. One icon showed up recently, and I couldn’t figure out where it came from. If I clicked it, the only thing that happened was that its background become highlighted. I couldn’t drag it off the menu bar. So what was it? How could I get rid of it?

Bell icon menu bar

You can see it above; it’s third from the right. It’s dimmed in the screenshot, and when I click it, it just adds a blue background.

It turns out that it’s something added by Google Chrome, a browser I use for some sites.

In searching for a solution, it seemed that there were some arcane hidden settings that you’d need to access to turn it off. But then I found that there is a simply menu command, in the Chrome menu, that turns it off too.

Chrome notifications menu

So, just choose Chrome > Hide Notifications Icon, and it’ll go away.