How to hide your bookmarks bar in Google Meet
Before you share, press Ctrl+Shift+B (⌘+Shift+B on a Mac) to toggle the bar off, or share a single tab instead of your whole screen — a shared tab cannot contain the bookmarks bar at all.
Meet runs entirely in the browser, which means this is one of the cases that is completely solvable. Everything below is about making it reliable rather than remembered.
Why Meet is the easy case
Google Meet asks Chrome for your screen using the browser's own screen-share API. Everything happens inside Chrome, which means Chrome knows a share has started — and so can anything running inside Chrome. Compare that with a desktop conferencing app, which captures your screen at the operating-system level where the browser has no idea it is happening.
The three-second version
- Pick "Chrome Tab" in the share dialog when what you are showing is a web page. It is the first option Meet offers. The bookmarks bar is not part of a captured tab, so there is nothing to hide.
- If you must share a window or your whole screen, toggle the bar off with Ctrl+Shift+B before you open the picker — not after, because the picker's own preview thumbnail is drawn the moment it opens.
- Turn it back on afterwards, which is the step everyone forgets, and which is why the bar is up again by the next call.
The failure this actually has
None of that is difficult. It is just conditional on you doing it while someone is talking to you, on a call you joined forty seconds late, on the day you happened to have the other client's renewal doc pinned to the bar. The problem was never that hiding the bar is hard. It is that remembering to is a coin flip, and the downside is not symmetrical.
Where Skrim comes in
Skrim is a free Chrome extension that does one thing: it watches for a screen share starting and takes your bookmarks bar down before the first frame goes out, then puts every bookmark back at the exact position it came from when the share ends. There is nothing to remember and nothing to press.
It makes no network requests of any kind — no server, no account, no
analytics — and that is a claim you can check rather than one you have to
take: the extension is source-available, and one grep for
fetch across the code comes back empty.
Meet is one of the two surfaces tested end to end in a real browser, and Meet's own picker previews clean.
What it does not cover
- Desktop apps. The Zoom desktop client, the Loom desktop app, OBS and QuickTime capture outside Chrome entirely, where no extension can see them.
- Chrome's own share picker preview. On a site that asks for your screen the instant it loads, the thumbnail Chrome draws inside the picker can still show the bar for a moment. Google Meet and Zoom on the web both preview clean, but it is a limit of the picker, not something an extension can reach.
- Anything other than the bookmarks bar. Not your tabs, not your notifications, not your desktop. One bar is the whole job.
Have it happen on its own
Skrim is in review for the Chrome Web Store. One email when it ships, and nothing else.
We store your address and the date, and use it once — to tell you Skrim is out. See the privacy policy.