How to Hide the Bookmarks Bar in Chrome (Including the New Tab Page)

The fast answer: Ctrl + Shift + B on Windows and Linux, Cmd + Shift + Bon macOS. That toggles Chrome's bookmarks bar off and on.

If that were the whole story this page would not need to exist. The reason people keep searching for it is the part the shortcut does not fix: you hide the bar, you open a new tab, and there it is again. That is not a bug, and no amount of pressing the shortcut will change it. Here is the full picture, including the setting that has three states rather than two, and the one approach that actually clears the New Tab page.

The Setting Has Three States, Not Two

The keyboard shortcut makes the bookmarks bar look like a binary. It is not. Paste chrome://settings/appearance into the address bar and look at Show bookmarks bar. Chrome offers:^[1]

• Always — visible on every page, including new tabs.
• Never — hidden on websites. Still visible on the New Tab page.
• New Tab page only — the middle ground, and the one most people actually want without knowing it exists.

The menu route is the three-dot menu in the top right, then Bookmarks and Lists, then Show bookmarks bar. Note the name: older guides say the submenu is called “Bookmarks,” which it was for years. Chrome renamed it to “Bookmarks and Lists” when it folded in reading list and tab groups, so if you are following an older tutorial and cannot find the entry, that is why.

The New Tab Page Problem

Set it to Never and the bar still appears on the New Tab page. This is the single most-reported frustration with the feature and it catches people out because it looks like the setting failed to apply. It did apply. Chrome deliberately keeps the bar on its own New Tab surface.^[2]

There are two ways around it, and they are not equally good.

The flags route (fragile). Chrome flags at chrome://flagshave at times carried an entry governing the persistent bookmarks bar on the New Tab page, searchable under “bookmarks bar” or “ntp-bookmarks.”^[2]I would not build a habit on this. Flags are unshipped experiments; Google adds, renames, and deletes them between releases with no notice and no migration. If a flag exists in your build and you want to try it, fine, but treat it as temporary and expect it to vanish at an update.

The extension route (reliable).The bar is bound to Chrome's internal chrome://newtab page. An extension that replaces the new tab page substitutes its own document, so there is no Chrome new tab surface for the bar to attach to and it stays hidden.^[2] Any minimal new-tab extension does this as a side effect of what it already does.

When the Setting Is Greyed Out

On a work laptop the toggle is sometimes visible but dead, often with a small briefcase or building icon next to it and a note that the setting is managed. That means Chrome Enterprise policy is in force. The relevant policy is BookmarkBarEnabled, and when an administrator sets it, it wins over your local preference, your keyboard shortcut, and any flag.^[3]

There is no local workaround, and the ones circulating on forums that involve editing the registry or a policy plist either fail on a managed device or violate the acceptable-use policy you agreed to. If it matters enough, the fix is a ticket to whoever runs your device fleet. You can check what is applied by visiting chrome://policy, which lists every policy in force and its value.

Other Browsers

The binding is unusually consistent across the browser market:

• Edge and Brave — Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + B. Both are Chromium, so behavior matches Chrome closely, including their own equivalents of the three-state setting.
• Firefox — Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + B toggles the bookmarks toolbar. Firefox also exposes an Only show on New Tab option, the same middle ground Chrome offers, reachable by right-clicking the toolbar area.
• Safari — Cmd + Shift + B toggles the favorites bar, under View in the menu bar.

If You Keep the Bar, Make It Earn the Space

A bookmarks bar row costs roughly 28 to 34 pixels depending on platform and zoom. On a 13-inch laptop at 800 logical pixels of height, that is about 4% of everything you can see, spent permanently. It is worth it if the bar saves you clicks and not worth it otherwise, and the usual reason it does not is that people put 15 items on it with full titles and then cannot find any of them.

Strip the names. Right-click a bookmark, choose Edit, clear the Name field, and it renders as a bare favicon. That takes a bookmark from roughly 100 pixels wide to roughly 30, so a bar that held 8 to 12 named items holds 25 to 30 icons. Favicons are also faster to hit than text, because you are matching a shape rather than reading a word.

The genuinely better move for anything you do not open daily is to skip the bar entirely and use the address bar. Chrome's omnibox searches your history, bookmarks, and open tabs as you type, so three characters usually gets you there. That beats scanning a strip of icons and it keeps working when the list grows past what fits on screen, which a bookmarks bar fundamentally does not. Reserve the bar for the four or five things you genuinely open every day, and use Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + O to open the bookmark manager for the long tail.

If you are optimizing screen real estate more broadly, the same reasoning applies to the rest of the chrome around your content, and it is the same instinct behind turning off a laptop touchpad when an external mouse is attached: remove the thing that costs you something every session and gives back nothing.