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Delete Your Bookmark Bar

Mar 20 2013

I don't remember where, but maybe about half a year ago I read about someone arguing that you don't need a bookmark bar in your browser anymore. Back then, having a bookmark bar was an incredibly useful feature - go to your favourite websites with a single click! But there are several reasons the bookmark bar isn't as useful as it was a couple of years ago. Here's why I just removed it:

Increased Number of Websites

Over the years, you add more and more websites to the bookmark bar, and you tend to go through them in a regular fashion. Many of them might not be worth visiting anymore, but you still go there out of routine, just because you are reminded to go there by the bookmark bar. This was actually the reasoning to delete the bookmarks in the original article I read: If you remember the URL to a website, it is probably worth visiting.

Distraction

Those little icons are somewhat tempting to click on and procrastinate if you want do do something useful.

Screen Space

Removing the bookmark bar adds some additional precious vertical screen space for the website you visit. This means less scrolling and faster browsing, especially on widescreen monitors.

Presentations

If you present something in your browser, you might not want the bookmark bar to be there - even if you don't care about privacy, it still distracts the audience. You might find yourself temporarily disabling it (like me) and not enabling it anymore.

Autocompletion

Thanks to the increasing usefulness of autocompletion mechanisms, you can usually go to the website you want by a single keystroke in the URL field. Combined with the "enter URL" shortcut (usually ctrl+L/cmd+L), this is much faster on laptops than moving the mouse to a tiny target.

Even if you remove your bookmark bar, Chrome still displays its items in the "New Tab" screen. This might serve as a good compromise. Also, this doesn't mean I don't bookmark anything anymore. Bookmarks are incredibly useful for, well, bookmarking websites and articles with long URLs. But there might be no need to bookmark facebook.com.

Super Mario Bros Coin Sound

Mar 17 2013

If that isn't a great composition :)

Super Mario Bros (1985) Coin Sound

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