How to get an icon-only bookmarks bar

Bookmark names eat your bar. Most of them repeat what the icon already tells you, and a dozen labelled bookmarks fill the space thirty icons could use. Strip the names and the bar becomes a tidy row of icons: quicker to scan, and with room for everything you actually use. Here is how to go icon-only, and how to keep it readable once you do.

Turn a bookmark into just its icon

Right-click a bookmark on your bookmarks bar, choose Edit, delete everything in the name field, and save. The bookmark keeps working exactly as before; it just shows its favicon alone. The same steps work in Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Arc, and how to edit bookmarks has the equivalents for Safari and Firefox. Do it for each bookmark you want shrunk; a full bar takes a couple of minutes, once.

Which bookmarks suit going icon-only

Strip the names from sites whose logo you know on sight: your mail, your calendar, the sites you open every day. Those icons carry the meaning by themselves. Keep a short one-word name on anything with a generic icon, like an internal tool or a plain-looking docs site, so you are not left hovering over mystery icons. A mixed bar, mostly icons with a few short labels, beats a purist one you cannot read.

Separators keep an icon-only bar readable

There is one catch. Thirty icons in an unbroken row blur together, and you trade a wall of text for a wall of icons. The fix is to mark where each group starts: a separator between work and personal, another before your reading pile, and suddenly every icon sits in a section you can find without thinking. That is exactly what Diviide makes. Pick a color, drag a divider between the groups, and the bar reads like a dashboard. See how to add bookmark separators to set yours up in a few seconds.

Common questions

Can Chrome show icon-only bookmarks automatically?

No. Chrome has no setting that hides all bookmark names at once. You clear each name by hand: right-click the bookmark, choose Edit, delete the name, and save. It takes a few seconds per bookmark and only needs doing once.

Do icon-only bookmarks still work the same?

Yes. Clearing the name changes nothing but the label. The bookmark keeps its address, its position, its folder, and its icon, and it opens the same page it always did.

What if a site has a plain or confusing icon?

Keep a short name on that one. An icon-only bar works best when you can name every icon on sight, so give the anonymous-looking ones a one-word label and strip the rest.