Quickly Access Chrome’s Inner Pages with Bookmark Shortcuts
One under-appreciated feature about Chrome that goes unnoticed is that important inner pages like Bookmarks Manager, Downloads & Extensions come with its own URL and a specific protocol. So you can easily add these shortcuts as pages to your bookmarks bar. Here’s a list of URL shortcuts that you can use to quickly access these pages: Bookmarks Manager: chrome://bookmarks/ Extensions: chrome://extensions/ Settings: chrome://settings/ Downloads: chrome://downloads/ History: chrome://history/ Now, all you need to do is to add or ‘drag and drop’ these shortcuts into the bookmark bar. Once added, this is how the icons will look like : A simple click on these bookmarks will now do the same work as the multi step process from the 3-dot menu.
Making Bookmarks Bar a Powerful Navigation Tool
Though Firefox first started utilizing the space below addressbar as a place for addons, feeds and bookmarks, I think Chrome nailed the execution. If you are not using the bookmarks bar, I strongly recommend you to start right now. You won’t need to type any website ever in your life again.
First, How to Enable the Bookmarks Bar
Click on the three-dot menu in the top right corner and go to settings. Then, under Appearance check the Always show the bookmarks bar option. Another quick way to hide/unhide it is to use keyboard shortcuts – Ctrl+Shift+B.
Adding Sites to the Bookmarks Bar
After enabling the bookmarks bar you’ll see that it sits right below the address bar. To save any page as a bookmark, right click the bookmarks bar and select Add Page to add the URL and name of the site. You can also simply drag and drop a site icon from the address bar to the bookmark bar to quickly add it there.
Adding Folders
Another way to fit more bookmarks is by making folders. You can do this by right-clicking the bookmarks bar and selecting Add Folder. Once you’ve given a name to the folder like News, Recipes, etc, you can add links to the folder. If you’d like to delete any bookmark or folder, right-clicking the link or folder and selecting Delete should do the trick. While that concludes the article on using Chrome bookmarks to your advantage, we’ll be sure to add more Chrome tips and tricks as we come across them in the future. Footnote: According to W3Counter’s 2017 usage report, Google Chrome still dominates the market as the most used browser on the desktop holding nearly 61% of the market share. As a loyal Firefox user till 2010, I remember holding out for the longest time only to switch finally after using Google’s bookmarks sync feature which was introduced in a Chrome Canary build, and not looking back ever since.
