Tips for a cleaner chrome

As I discussed in a previous post (custom search engines for efficiency), I love simple tweaks that provide an improved workflow, don't make me think, and reclaim wasted screen real-estate.

With the release of Firefox 4, namely the new App Tab feature, I decided I would share some tips I've been using in Google Chrome, hoping others will find them useful.

Pictures are worth a thousand words, so:

Before:

After:

As you can see, a much cleaner chrome - and it's really simple.

Tip #1: Remove bookmark names

It's highly unlikely that you can't identify bookmarked sites you visit often from their favicon - so why require yourself to read useless text.

The useless text also gobbles up important real-estate. Reclaim it!

Tip #2: Pin always opened tabs

I don't recall when Chrome implemented tab pinning, but it's been a while. Tab pinning is really useful for sites you like to keep open (e.g. web mail) as they don't take up space on your tab bar, and are visually identifiable from other tabs.

Right click on a tab and choose Pin Tab, it's that simple.

Tip #3: Use tab keyboard shortcuts

Lastly, use the keyboard shortcut crtl + $tab_number to quickly jump to open tabs. Very useful when using pinned tabs as the shortcut is based on tab ordering.