How to access Chrome bookmarks from a side panel
Chrome’s bookmarks live in a bar just below the URL bar. You can choose to show or hide it with the Ctrl+Shift+B keyboard shortcut. The bookmarks bar cannot show all bookmarks and they have to be tucked into a menu where you can scroll through them. It’s either that, or you can open the Bookmarks’ Manager and access them from there. Other browsers do it a bit differently; they add the bookmarks as a side panel. If you’d like to get a Chrome bookmarks side panel, you can get it with an extension called Bookmark Sidebar.
Chrome bookmarks side panel
Install Bookmark Sidebar from the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, it will walk you through a brief set up which you don’t want to ignore. The last step lets you choose how the bookmarks side panel will appear. You can have it appear when you mouse over the selected side of your browser, when you click the extension’s icon, when you right-click your browser’s side, or when you left-click it.
After that, your selected action will bring up the bookmarks side panel. You’ll find that it is very smooth to open, quick to dismiss, and easy to navigate through.
As for its appearance, if you go to the extension’s options, you will find there is tons to customize with respect to the appearance. You can also have your bookmarks appear on the new tab page however, you will need to enable this from the extension’s options.
The bookmarks panel that Bookmark Sidebar adds lets you rearrange bookmarks and move folders up/down. It also has a search bar that you can use to search the bookmarks, and a button that lets you sort them alphabetically, most frequently used, and recently used. It can also be navigated with just your keyboard.
It’s hard to imagine Google adding anything better than what Bookmark Sidebar does. It looks good, is more customizable than most aspects of Chrome, and has practical features for managing bookmarks.
Bookmark Sidebar also has a premium version which gives you access to experimental features and more customization options. With the premium version, you can change the width of the panel, you can check your bookmarks for broken links which is great if you’re looking to clean them up, and even create your own Stylesheet. The premium version is available at three different price points, all of which give you the same features. The different price points are basically just choices to make it more affordable.
I installed the extension. It did nothing. I chose left-click, light color and left side during setup. It told me to try it by left-clicking on the side of my browser.
The bookmarks bar was unmoved, still stuck across the top.
I uninstalled the extension.