It's pretty common for people to bookmark their favorite websites. It's just easier to re-open sites that you use every day by clicking on a bookmark than it is to type (or try and remember) a website's URL. For frequently-visited sites, sites that you use daily, it often makes sense to put these bookmarks in the Bookmarks Bar, a narrow piece of real estate below the URL bar in most browsers:





To add a new bookmark to the Bookmarks Bar in Chrome:

  1. Navigate to the website you want to add.
  2. Click on the star icon on the right side of the URL bar.
  3. Give your bookmark a name and choose "Bookmarks bar" for the Folder. Then click Done.


*If you're not seeing the Bookmarks bar in your copy of Chrome, you can show/hide it with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + B or by enabling it in your settings menu.

Here's the thing, though: the bookmarks bar isn't an infinite reservoir of space. It only takes 8-10 bookmarks or so, before you'll fill up the entire Bookmarks bar:


So what's a space-starved bookmark user to do? Break out the Mini-Bookmarks.

See, most websites have a small icon associated with the site called a favicon. You can see a website's favicon (if it has one) next to the site's name in its browser tab. The TSS favicon, for example, is a bison icon.:


You can use these favicons as stand-ins for your favorite bookmarks, vastly increasing the number of bookmarks that you can fit in the Bookmarks bar. Here's how.

1. Right-click on one of your favorite bookmarks and select "Edit...". It's important that it has a favicon that's distinct from any of its neighbors in the Bookmarks bar. If you use this trick with three Google Sheets, for instance, their mini-bookmarks will be identical and you won't be able to tell which is which.



2. In the Edit menu, delete the name of your bookmark, leaving the Name field blank.



3. Click 'Save' at the bottom of the dialog box.

Now you have a mini-bookmark! Chrome will omit the bookmark's name (you deleted it) and just show the favicon for your bookmark, like this: 


If you repeat this process, you can literally quadruple the number of websites that will fit in the bookmarks bar. I once saw someone working in the Denver airport who had taken this idea to the extreme, with probably 40 favicons in his Bookmarks bar. Take a look at the before-and-after comparison.




Note that this trick works best in Chrome and Firefox, which both show favicons along with bookmark names. In Safari, by contrast, favicons aren't shown, so mini-bookmarks won't work there.