How do I remove the Chrome App Launcher in Windows 8?

So I downloaded and installed Windows 8. I'm very impressed, except for one thing. I don't have touch, and I have this running in a virtual machine. How do I exit one of these full screen Modern UI apps using just a mouse and a keyboard? Right now my only method to exit one of these guys is to send Ctrl+Alt+Del to the machine. I'm sure that's not the right way... anyone figured this out?

• Use the keyboard. Alt + F4 still works like a charm
• Use the top edge:
  1. Move your mouse or finger to the top of the screen {except for the top left extreme and top right extreme}
  2. Click/tap and drag to bottom of screen. The app will close when you get to the bottom.
• Use the left edge: Bring the cursor in the very top (or bottom) left corner of the screen then move the mouse against the border up (or down). Now you can:
  • Middle click any app to close it.
  • Right click any app to show the contextual menu, with Close being an option.
  • Drag any app left onto the current app, then without releasing bring it to the bottom to close it

Please note that in Windows 8, in some cases apps are not supposed to be closed. This is part of the general Modern UI experience; however, because of popular demand, Microsoft did add this feature in the consumer preview.

See Microsoft's official video on mouse usage in Windows 8 here. Also a good video to watch is the touch video.

Press the Windows Key, it's like a 'home' button.

It looks like it's you're not supposed to 'close' apps in a traditional sense, and should be in a 'suspended' mode instead this is achieved by just going and doing something else like going back to the home screen...

Nick Josevski gave the answer if you just want to go back to the Start screen, but, if you want to actually close it then the Ctrl + Alt + Del method works as you said. The best approach I've seen however is the good old Alt + F4 combination, which still seems to close applications.

I would have thought there is a better way, but I haven't found it yet.

(Little notice - When I first fired up Windows 8, I had problems closing applications and did try Alt + F4 to get out the plane application with no luck. However, it appears to be working now. I am not sure what was going on earlier and can only guess it was gremlins in the preview!)

Here is an answer from someone at MS on this forum thread:

The idea is Modern UI Style apps are not closed. The system takes care of keeping the apps from consuming background resources automatically. You can examine the app lifetime information in the developer documentation if you'd like. [...] Alt+F4 only works in the dev tools integrated builds as a developer feature and is not a general mechanism.

The short answer is that you're supposed to leave Modern UI applications as suspended. If you need to free up memory or manage to write something that kills the system, you can kill Modern UI apps using the task manager. I'd assume that they're going to tidy up the behaviour of alt-tab at some point, but for now it's not that nice.

If you're accessing over "mstsc" RDP(Remote Desktop Protocol) and want to go to the start screen but can't hit the start button on your keyboard directly, then Alt+Home might help you out.

Similarly, if you want to kill the application/process use Ctrl+Alt+Delete, then Ctrl+Alt+End should send that combination through.

If you are running Windows 8 in a virtual machine and the host intercepts the Windows key, try carefully moving your mouse to the bottom-left corner of the Windows 8 screen. The Start button should appear.

Starting with Windows 8 Consumer Preivew, you can close Modern UI applications by click and dragging from the top of the application all the way down to the bottom of the screen. The touch gesture works the same way.

I just found a more elegant solution than three-fingered salute... Win+R, then click on the Start icon (Windows icon, bottom left). But I'm ready to use the actual method.