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How to disable switch view buttons at the bottom of the File Explorer window

In Windows 8, Microsoft changed the look of the good old Explorer application completely. It got the Ribbon UI instead of the menu and the toolbar. There are also tiny buttons to switch view at the bottom right corner of the window. If you never use these buttons, you might want to turn them off. In this article, we will see how to get rid of those buttons to switch views.

The tiny buttons are not useful for me, because they are just too small. Personally, I prefer to use hotkeys to switch between views in File Explorer, as described in the following article: how to switch between views in File Explorer with keyboard shortcuts.

So here is how to disable those buttons.

  1. Open the Control Panel
  2. Go to the following path:
    Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization
  3. Click the "Folder Options" item to open the appropriate applet.
  4. In the Folder Options window, switch to the View tab and untick the "Show status bar" checkbox.
    show status bar checkbox
    This will disable those tiny buttons as well.
    switch view buttons disabled

Unfortunately, there is no way to keep the status bar and disable only the view buttons. Anyway, the Windows 8 Explorer status bar is not that useful to me, so I can live without it. I prefer using the status bar added by Classic Shell's Explorer component which works like classic versions of Windows.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

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