Does FancyZones work with fullscreen apps? (and what to do instead)

Short answer: no. PowerToys FancyZones does not confine native-fullscreen apps or games to a zone. When an app enters true fullscreen — a maximized video, a PowerPoint slideshow, a game, an F11 browser — FancyZones steps aside and the app takes over the entire monitor. This is by design, and it’s one of the most-requested missing features in PowerToys.

Why doesn’t FancyZones confine fullscreen apps?

FancyZones works by snapping windowed applications into zones you draw. Starting around release v0.12.0 it deliberately stopped interfering with fullscreen applications, so anything that goes genuinely fullscreen bypasses your zones entirely. Open a YouTube video fullscreen or launch a game and it spans the whole display — there’s no clean way to make it fill just your defined zone.

If you search the PowerToys issue tracker you’ll find this asked over and over (“allow programs to go fullscreen within a zone”, “allow full screen only for the zone an application is part of”). The requests are open and popular, but it isn’t how FancyZones is built.

What are the usual workarounds?

Most guides suggest one of these:

• Borderless windowed mode. If the app supports it, borderless-windowed doesn’t trigger true fullscreen, so FancyZones can snap it. Many games and video players offer this — but plenty don’t, and you often have to hunt for the setting.
• Manual window sizing tools. Some people pair a game’s windowed mode with a separate utility to resize and re-center the window over a zone. It works, but it’s fiddly and per-app.
• A virtual-display driver. These fake extra monitors so fullscreen apps land on a “second screen.” Effective, but they install a display driver and add moving parts to your graphics stack.

Each solves part of the problem. None gives you “just fullscreen the thing and it stays in its zone.”

How VirtualZones keeps fullscreen apps in a zone

VirtualZones was built specifically for this gap. It watches for windows that take over the screen — fullscreen, maximized, or work-area-filling — and snaps them flush into the zone they belong to, instead of letting them cover the whole monitor.

So a Zoom call, a PowerPoint slideshow, or a fullscreen video stays boxed in one part of your screen while the rest stays usable — the thing FancyZones can’t do.

The honest caveats

VirtualZones takes the no-driver route, and that has one documented limit:

• Exclusive-fullscreen DirectX games bypass the desktop compositor entirely and can’t be confined — use the game’s borderless-windowed mode, and it confines like any other window.

Everything else — maximized apps, slideshows, video players, browser F11 in Chrome, Edge or Firefox (Chrome and Edge since version 1.3.16) — snaps into its zone. See the full list on the features page and the troubleshooting guide.

Try it

If you’ve been fighting FancyZones to keep a fullscreen app in one region, download VirtualZones — it’s free for 7 days, a single ~700 KB exe, no driver and no admin rights.