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What is Bookmark Bar Switcher?

Bookmark Bar Switcher lets you keep several separate bookmark bars in your browser and switch between them with a click or a keyboard shortcut. Instead of cramming work, personal, side-project, and reference links into one crowded bar, you keep a bar per context and swap the one you need onto the toolbar - so only the bookmarks for what you're doing right now are showing.

Two things set it apart from other bookmark switchers. A common bar lets you share one set of bookmarks into the bars you choose, maintained in a single place - edit it once and every bar that uses it updates. And its copy-based design stays safe when the same browser account syncs across several computers, where other switchers end up scrambling your bars.

Available for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, with the interface translated into 27 languages.

Multiple bookmark bars

The browser only ever shows one bookmark bar. With this extension you keep as many bars as you like - one for "Work", one for "Personal", one for "Project Foo", one for "Reading" - and switch which one is currently on the toolbar. The active bar looks and behaves exactly as if it were your only bar; the others wait out of sight until you switch to them.

A typical setup: start with everything in your current bar, create a new bar for each context, fill each one with just the bookmarks it needs, then switch between them as you change tasks.

How bars are stored

Each bar is a saved set of bookmarks. The sets live in a hidden folder named "Bookmark Bars" (inside Other Bookmarks), and the bar you actually see on the toolbar is a disposable working copy. Switching wipes the visible toolbar and copies the chosen set onto it; your saved sets are never moved or edited by the act of switching.

This matters for two reasons covered later: it makes switching instant and reversible, and it's the foundation of staying safe across your computers. You never touch the "Bookmark Bars" container yourself - you work entirely through the popup and the Settings page.

Switching bars

You can switch the active bar two ways: from the popup (click the toolbar icon) or with a keyboard shortcut. Both do the same thing - replace the visible bar with another saved set.

Click the extension's toolbar icon to open the popup. It shows a list of every bar you have. The bar that's currently loaded is marked; click any other bar to switch to it immediately. A dot appears next to the loaded bar when it has unsaved changes. The popup footer carries the icon refresh button on the left, and on the right the online help, the source repository, and the Settings page (the gear icon), where all bar management lives.

By default the popup hides bars you've marked as common. Tick Show common bars to list them too - useful when you want to switch directly to a common bar to edit it.

Keyboard shortcuts

The extension provides twelve commands. Four have default key bindings; the rest are unbound, and you assign your own keys in the browser's shortcut settings.

Command	Default	Action
Next bar	`Ctrl+Down`	Switch to the next bar in the list
Previous bar	`Ctrl+Up`	Switch to the previous bar
Switch to 1	`Ctrl+Shift+1`	Jump straight to the 1st bar
Switch to 2	`Ctrl+Shift+2`	Jump straight to the 2nd bar
Switch to 3 … 10	unbound	Jump to the 3rd through 10th bar - bind your own keys

The order the bars appear in (which you set on the Settings page) is the order Ctrl+Down cycles through, and the order the numbered jumps map to. To bind the unbound commands: in Chrome / Edge open chrome://extensions/shortcuts (or edge://extensions/shortcuts); in Firefox open about:addons, then the gear menu → Manage Extension Shortcuts.

Unsaved changes and saving

Because the visible bar is a working copy, you can rearrange it freely - and you decide when those edits become part of the saved set.

Unsaved changes

When you add, remove, or rearrange bookmarks on the visible bar, the loaded bar is marked as having unsaved changes (a dot in the popup). Those edits are not yet stored in the saved set. If you switch to another bar while changes are pending, the extension asks first - you can save the changes to the current bar, discard them, or cancel and stay put.

Save bar changes to this set - on the loaded bar's row in the popup, saves the visible bar's current contents back into that bar's saved set. (Bookmarks that came from a common bar are not written into the set - they belong to the common, and reappear automatically on the next switch.)

Common bars

A common bar is a bar whose bookmarks you want to appear on several other bars without copying them by hand. You maintain the shared bookmarks in one place - the common bar - and each other bar can pull them in. This is the feature no other bookmark switcher offers.

How common bars work

Mark any bar as common. Its contents can then be prepended to other bars that opt to use it. When you switch to a bar that uses a common, the common's bookmarks are merged in first, then the bar's own bookmarks follow. The merge is by folder name: if both the common and the bar have a folder called "Docs", their contents are combined into one "Docs" folder rather than producing two.

The common stays the single source of truth. Bookmarks that came from a common are read-only in the merged view - if you edit or delete one on the visible bar, it's restored from the common on the next switch. Edit the common bar itself (switch to it directly) and every bar that uses it reflects the change the next time it's loaded. To curate a common, turn on Show common bars in the popup so you can switch to it.

Example. You keep a common bar "Daily" with Mail, Calendar, and a Team folder. Your "Work" bar uses "Daily" and adds its own Jira and a Team folder containing Standup notes. Switching to "Work" shows: Mail, Calendar, a Team folder holding both the common's items and Standup notes, then Jira. Edit "Daily" to add Chat, and Chat appears on every bar that uses "Daily".

The mark-common controls are on the Settings page, on each bar's card:

Mark as common bar (its bookmarks can be prepended to other bars) - marks the bar as common (and, when it's already common, unmarks it).
Add this common bar to every other bar - adds this common to every other bar's selection in one step.
Remove this common bar from every other bar - removes this common from every other bar's selection.

Choosing which commons a bar uses

Commons are opt-in per bar - a new bar uses none until you add them - and the selection is ordered, so you control which shared sets each context shows and in what sequence. You set this on each non-common bar's card in Settings.

Commons - the list of common bars this bar currently pulls in, in prepend order.
Add a common bar… - pick a common bar from the dropdown and confirm to add it to this bar's list.
Remove from this bar - drop a common from this bar's list (it stays a common bar; this bar just stops using it).

Safe across your computers

If you use the same browser account on more than one computer, your bookmarks already sync between them. This extension is built so that switching bars survives that sync intact - a problem that breaks most other bookmark switchers.

Why it stays safe

Your saved bars are stored as real browser bookmarks, so your account syncs them to every computer you sign into. The trick is that switching never moves those saved sets - it only copies one onto a throwaway toolbar - and the choice of which bar is currently active is remembered per machine, locally (it is not synced). Because nothing mutable is shared between machines, browser autosync has nothing to collide on.

Other switchers move bookmarks in and out of the toolbar, and the toolbar itself is synced - so two computers fight over it. A common failure: you leave PC 1 on "Bar 1" and power it off; you work on PC 2 with "Bar 2" showing; later both sync, and you end up with PC 2's bookmarks dumped onto "Bar 1" while "Bar 2" sits empty - a tangle. The copy-based, per-machine design here is exactly what avoids that.

Managing bars

All bar management lives on the Settings page - open it from the gear icon in the popup footer. Each bar appears as a card you can act on.

+ Add bar - type a name and create a new, empty bar.
Rename a bar by editing its name on its card.
Drag to reorder bars - drag a bar's handle to reorder it. The order here drives the popup order and the keyboard jump numbers.
Delete this bar - delete a bar. Since this removes the bar and all its bookmarks, you're asked to confirm; the last remaining bar can't be deleted.
Language - choose the extension's interface language (or follow the browser's language automatically).

Refreshing bookmark icons

Some bookmarks sit on the bar with a blank page icon instead of the site's own little logo, and they stay blank forever. That isn't the extension's doing: a browser only ever learns a site's icon by loading the page, so a bookmark you imported, restored from a backup, or created without visiting the site has no icon to show. One button fills them in.

The button is the leftmost icon in the popup footer. Click it and the extension quietly opens the pages that need it in background tabs - four at a time, never stealing your focus - waits just long enough for each icon to arrive, and closes the tab again. Progress is shown under the bar list, and the run ends by reporting how many icons it managed to bring in.

Refresh missing bookmark icons (Shift-click: all) - a plain click refreshes only the bookmarks that currently have no icon. Shift-click refreshes every bookmark on the bar instead, which is what you want when a site has changed its icon - that bookmark already has an icon cached, just the old one.

The work runs in the extension's background service, not in the popup, so you can close the popup and keep browsing while it finishes; reopen it and it picks the run back up where it is. It only ever touches the bar that is currently loaded, and it changes nothing about your bookmarks themselves - only the icons the browser draws beside them.

Which bookmarks get visited

Working out which bookmarks are missing an icon is guesswork on the browser's side, so the extension checks whether it can tell before relying on it: if it can't, it refreshes the whole bar rather than quietly skipping bookmarks. That is also what happens on Firefox, which offers no way at all to read the icon cache - there, every click refreshes every bookmark on the bar, and each page is given a fixed moment to load, so a big bar takes noticeably longer than on Chrome or Edge.

A page that never produces an icon (a site that's down, a link that no longer exists) is given up on after fifteen seconds and simply stays blank; nothing is deleted and nothing else in the run is affected.

Import and export

The Settings page backs up and restores your bars as files, one bar at a time, in the format you pick. Export saves a bar to a file; import always adds a bar, so a restore can never overwrite what you already have. In every case, the visible bookmark bar is never touched - only your saved sets.

Export this bar to a file - the export icon on each bar saves that single bar (its name, bookmarks, and folder structure) to its own file.
Import bar… - the button beside Add bar loads a bar from a file. It always arrives as a new bar named after the original with the export date in parentheses, for example dev (2026-07-16). It never replaces or empties an existing bar.

Because import adds instead of replacing, you can restore a backup right next to the original, check it is what you wanted, and only then delete the one you no longer need - so a bar can never be erased by an accidental import. Use export to move bars between Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, or to keep a backup before a major reorganization or a browser reinstall.

File formats

A bar can be written in four formats, chosen in the Import & export section of Settings. They fall into two groups, and the difference matters:

JSON is the complete backup. It stores everything, including which common bars the bar pulls in, so a bar restored from JSON comes back exactly as it was. Use it whenever the point is to keep or move a bar.
Markdown, BBCode, and AsciiDoc are readable text. They hold the bar's folders and links and nothing else - paste one into a forum post, a wiki page, or a project README and it renders as a tidy nested list of links. A bar exported this way and imported back keeps its folders and links, but loses its common-bar selection.
File format - the format the export icon writes. It has no effect on import.

Import accepts all four and works out which one it is looking at from the file itself, so the picker can never cause a mismatch: hand it a .json backup while the dropdown says BBCode and it is still read as JSON. Files with an extension none of the formats claim are refused with a message listing the ones that work. If a hand-edited text file contains a line that isn't a usable link, that one entry is dropped and the rest of the bar still imports.

Tips

Treat each bar as a project or context, not an alphabet. "Work", "Side project X", "Job hunt", "Holiday planning" - each gets only the bookmarks it actually needs.
Put your always-there links in a common bar. The handful of links you want everywhere (mail, calendar, a shared team folder) belong in one common, not copied into every bar by hand.
Bind the numbered jumps if you live on the keyboard. Ctrl+Shift+1 and 2 are bound out of the box; bind 3-10 in your browser's shortcut settings for direct access without cycling.
Reorder bars to match how you switch. The top bar is where Ctrl+Down starts cycling and what jump number 1 lands on.
Export before a big reorganization. It takes a moment and saves you if a delete confirmation goes the wrong way. Keep those backups as JSON - the text formats are for sharing, not for restoring.
Refresh the icons after importing a bar. An imported bar arrives with blank icons, because your browser has never loaded those pages; one click on the refresh button fills them in.
A bar can hold folders, not just flat links - nested folders inside a bar work normally.