I’ve used Firefox as my main browser for years, but recently have been considering switching to Chrome for a week or two. I was getting ready to pull my bookmarks over, when much to my surprise, I can’t seem to find a way to display bookmarks in a left sidebar similar to Firefox and IE. Is there something I’m missing here? I tried Googling this, but all I can find are user requests for this feature and extensions, most of which seem to require access to “Read and change all your data on the websites you visit,” which seems really unnecessary and excessive.
I do see there’s a bookmark bar that runs horizontally across the top, but that a) takes vertical space away from the pages, and b) displays a limited number of bookmarks (maybe a dozen?). I could put all my bookmarks in a folder, but then I’d be clicking it every time I needed a bookmark.
Any Chrome users who heavily use bookmarks for navigating have any tips? I’ve really become accustomed to having my 40 or so heavily-used bookmarks all within reach and on display so I can run down them in sequence.
If you’re literally running down in sequence you could just use the open all bookmarks in separate tabs option.
Personally I use the bookmarks bar, but with most of the bookmarks in folders. To be honest though I rarely use bookmarks in practice because Chrome’s URL autocomplete is so good. I can see using them if you visit a lot of pages on the same site.
I use the bookmarks bar too and have also organized my bookmarks into folders. Then again, the sites I visit daily I usually either get to by typing in the url or seeing it on the screen when I create a new tab - I don’t visit more than 10 sites a day regularly, I’d guess. The rest are stuck in bookmarks where I can get to them when I need to (things like my work’s HR department, 401k, investment account, credit card sites, etc).
This has been my usage pattern for a while when first sitting down at the computer. I run down a few links I open more frequently, and then have one folder of “once per day” links.
I’m going to go ahead and give Chrome a shot, and reorganized some of my bookmarks to make it work better in the horizontal bar. I’ll see how it goes for a week or so and see if I can adapt out of years of UI muscle memory.
I did find several things right away:
Chrome is much faster than Firefox (I actually run dev edition). So many times when I was working in tabs, content in one tab could make the whole thing choke. Seems much better in Chrome.
I really miss the configurability(?) of Firefox. In Firefox if I don’t like a behavior, it’s very likely there’s a setting in about:config to tweak it. For instance, I like the browser to stay open when closing the last tab (makes it easy to CTRL+F4 through a bunch of tabs quickly). There’s a setting within Firefox to do that. In Chrome I’ve got to add an extension. I like to have new tabs blank, which is another option, but Chrome insists on using the Google search page (not surprising to force users into that).
Chrome’s default scrolling is very janky. I never realized how much I’ve grown accustomed to smooth scrolling in Firefox. Thankfully there’s another extension to fix it, but it really should be in the default UI. There’s something in chrome://flags/ called Enable Smooth Scrolling, but it doesn’t seem to fix it.
I use the bookmark bar with folders as well. My most common sites are accessed through Speed Dial 2 extension in Chrome. I also use a password manager for anything that requires a password.
