title: How To Hide Chrome Web Driver Icon (Python-Selenium)
body: <p><strong>UPDATED WITH REASONING</strong></p>
  
  <p><strong>Goal:</strong> Run chrome web driver in background <strong>without showing an app icon in the dock or application bar</strong>. FYI: I can already run chrome headless, but I have not been able to hide or not show the chrome icon in my app bar.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Reason:</strong> I am building an application that accesses various websites in parallel and I would not like the chrome app icons to display for the synchronous tasks that are taking place. I want to run these tasks in the background.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Current Code with chrome options that will display headless chrome</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>chrome_options = Options()
  chrome_options.add_argument('headless')
  chrome_options.add_argument('window-size=1200x600')
  driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=executable_text, chrome_options=chrome_options)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>Research</strong></p>
  
  <p>list of chrome options: <a href="https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/</a></p>
  
  <p>one of many posts explaining how to do headless chrome: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33009963/selenium-chrome-driver-fail-to-start-in-background-without-a-start-up-window">Selenium - chrome Driver fail to start in background (without a start-up window)</a></p>
  
  <p><strong>How can I hide the chromedriver app icons from displaying? Is there a chrome option I can set in addition to setting the 'headless' chrome option?</strong> Is this more of an OS setting that needs to be made to run chromedriver in the background? I am successfully able to run multiple chromedrivers in headless mode but it would be nice to NOT show the chrome icons in the dock or application tray similar to how  phantomjs does not launch an app icon.</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/5LlQg.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/5LlQg.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>^In the image above those are the chromedrivers that run in headless mode displaying in my dock and ideally for my program I would not even want to display those icons since it is all background processing anyways.</p>