Vivaldi shows Chrome how to handle extension icons
One of Google Chrome's big usability issues, at least if you ask me, is that you cannot hide extension icons anymore completely in the browser.
Extension icons are either shown directly in the browser's main -- and only -- toolbar, or in the menu. There is no option to hide an icon completely, even if it does nothing at all.
If you install too many extensions in Chrome, then they will either take up a lot of space in the toolbar -- and reduce the space for the address bar in the process -- or in the menu.
Lets take a look at how the Vivaldi browser -- which is based on pretty much the same source as Chrome -- is handling things.
Vivaldi Extension icon visibility options
Vivaldi offers two core options when it comes to the visibility of extension icons in the browser. The first option that you have is to hide any extension icon in the browser's toolbar.
Vivaldi places extension icons in the main toolbar just like Google Chrome does. You can right-click on any extension icon however in the browser to hide the icon by selecting "hide button" from the context menu that opens up.
Selecting the option hides the icon from the browser UI. The icon won't be moved to the Vivaldi menu or another location, but is completely hidden in the interface.
You can restore the visibility of any icon by loading vivaldi://extensions and clicking on the "show button" button that is displayed next to the extension.
The Vivaldi team added a new option to the most recent Vivaldi 1.7 build. If things go well, it will be part of the next stable Vivaldi 1.7 release.
It allows you to add a visibility toggle for all extension icons to the browser UI. This feature is not enabled by default, and needs to be activated before it becomes available.
Load vivaldi://settings/addressbar/ in the browser's address bar to get started. Find the Extensions group on the page, and check "show extensions visibility toggle" on the page to enable the new feature.
It adds a button with three dots to the rightmost location of the Vivaldi toolbar. A click on it hides all extension icons, another exposes them again in the interface. Handy if you don't require the icons to be visible at all times, but only in certain situations.
Other browsers?
The Opera browser, also based on the pretty much the same code, offers better options as well. You need to load opera://extensions in the browser's address bar to list all installed extensions. There you find the "hide from toolbar" option which hides the extension icon from Opera's toolbar.
Firefox, and browser's based on Firefox code, is the most flexible of the browsers. It allows you to drag and drop extension icons for one, and gives you full control over each icon's position and visibility in the browser.
Microsoft Edge finally handles things exactly like Google Chrome. It displays icons either in the address bar, or in the main menu.
Closing Words
Vivaldi users have two options when it comes to extension icon visibility in the browser's UI. They can hide individual extension icons, useful if they never use them, or enable the toggle all function to hide all visible extension icons when they are not needed.
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.