How to Get Rid of the Bookmarks Bar in Chrome

The bookmarks bar in Chrome is a horizontal strip just below the address bar that shows your bookmarked sites. If you actually use it, it's a decent shortcut. If you don't, it's wasting somewhere around 28 pixels of vertical space at the top of every browser window, on a screen where vertical space is the scarcest resource. The toggle is one keyboard shortcut. Worth knowing.

The Shortcut

On Mac: Cmd + Shift + B. On Windows and Linux: Ctrl + Shift + B. Press once and the bookmarks bar disappears. Press again and it comes back. This is the same shortcut that works in Edge, Brave, and any other Chromium-based browser.

If you'd rather use the menu: click the three-dot menu in the top-right of Chrome, hover over "Bookmarks," and click "Show bookmarks bar." The checkmark indicates whether it's currently on or off.

The New Tab Page Exception

By default, the bookmarks bar is hidden on every regular page but shows up on the new tab page. That behavior is controlled by a separate setting, Show bookmarks bar on new tab page, which is on by default. If you want the bookmarks bar truly off everywhere, you may also need to disable that setting via Chrome's settings.

Settings > Appearance > toggle "Show bookmarks bar." This is the global on/off, separate from the keyboard shortcut state.

The Smarter Workflow

If you have bookmarks you actually use frequently, the bookmarks bar is the right place to keep them. Drag the most-used 5 to 10 sites onto the bar. Right-click each one and rename them to a single character or short word, so you can fit more icons in the same horizontal space. A bookmark with no name shows as just the favicon, which lets you fit roughly 25 to 30 site shortcuts in the same width.

For the long tail of bookmarks (sites you visit monthly rather than daily), use the bookmarks manager (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + O) instead. The manager is searchable, organizable into folders, and doesn't take up screen space. The bookmarks bar should be reserved for the small set of sites you visit constantly.

For most workflows, hiding the bookmarks bar entirely and using Chrome's address-bar autocomplete is the right answer. Type the first few letters of a site name into the address bar and Chrome surfaces it from your history, your bookmarks, and the search engine, all in one prompt. That's faster than scanning a horizontal bar of icons, especially as the bookmark list grows.