How to hide your bookmarks bar when you record your screen
Toggle the bar off with Ctrl+Shift+B (⌘+Shift+B on a Mac) before you start recording, and record a single tab or a single window rather than your whole screen wherever the tool allows it.
Recording deserves more care than a live call, for one reason: a call is over in an hour and a recording is a file. Whatever was on your bar is in that file for as long as it exists, in every copy of it, on every drive it is ever synced to.
The pre-flight, in order
- Bookmarks bar off. The shortcut above. Do it before the recorder opens its picker, because some pickers draw a live preview thumbnail the moment they appear.
- Record the narrowest thing that shows the point. A tab beats a window; a window beats the whole screen. A captured tab cannot contain the browser chrome around it, bookmarks bar included.
- Check the first ten seconds before you publish. Most leaks are in the frames before the recorder settled and you started talking.
- Then check your notifications settings, which is the other thing that ruins a take, and which nothing on this page can help you with.
Which recorders an extension can reach
The dividing line is the same one that decides everything else here: whether the capture goes through Chrome.
| Recorder | Reachable from inside Chrome? |
|---|---|
| Loom's Chrome extension recorder | Yes |
| Any site using Chrome's screen-share API | Yes |
| Loom desktop app | No |
| OBS | No |
| QuickTime, and macOS screen recording | No |
The "no" rows are not a gap waiting to be filled in a later version. They capture at the operating-system level, and no browser extension — this one or any other — can see that happening.
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.
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.