Button bar, combining downloads, bookmarks, extensions, history, view source, print, and more from a single button. Awesome!
"Awesome Button Bar" is a Chrome extension designed to declutter your browser by bringing together eleven essential functions - from extensions, history, downloads, and bookmarks to view source, options, and print. This tool even offers you recently added buttons like duplicate tab, second home, and refresh all tabs. Its customization feature allows you to choose which buttons to show and whether to open them in a new or current window.
Too many buttons cluttering up Chrome? This button contains eleven in one.
Extensions, history, downloads, bookmarks, view source, options, new window, and print are all here.
Recently added buttons are duplicate tab, second home, and refresh all tabs.
Showing each button on the bar is optional so you don’t have to have them all if you don’t want them all. Also, each button can be configured to open either in the current window or in a new window. Note: print to a new window now works too!
The idea is great, this app is IMO very good and useful, I like it and I always use it. I'm much more satisfied with it than Chrome's, well, TBH not surprisingly cumbersome, cluttered, from user's perspective not exactly logical, and of course not intuitive menu structure. Which not even entails just one menu, to say the least... This extension, on the other hand, is as simple and basic as it gets - maybe even a bit too oversimplified, at least for my taste; but then again, KISS! ;)) It does work, it does its simple job well, meanwhile making Chrome easier to use. IMO only some additional icons/functions, a tiny bit of a general overhaul, and together with this naturally an update is all it needs... And you know what would make it even more complete in all this? See down below my requests... :)
Nothing new in Chrome functionality, mainly as for basic and not intuitively enough reachable functions related to the "overall content" in the browser (so not for tabs, their management, pinning, grouping etc.; the tool is not for that). But it can open the basic chrome://... pages, or can perform some very basic command, like refreshing pages for example. In current tabs, new tabs, new windows, etc. - just the way it's logical, and available for the user to set up. And this all definitely in a better way than Chrome: radically straightforwardly, not causing annoying lags on older and weaker computers running Chrome, collecting everything (here represented by, well, a bit weird looking, but I think recognizable icons... and I, for one, like them :)) into one very simplistic dashboard-like drop-down bar, putting just icons after icons (those the user wants to be there) in only one small horizontal line - for me just perfect this way. Nothing vertical, nothing hierarchical, like what Chrome-like corporate product devs' obsession is nowadays.
BTW, I highly recommend everyone to go to the Settings page after installation, and then maybe answers to some complaints here, like issues with opening History, might be just found there... Just a recommendation concerning this for the devs too: as I see it, now the Settings is only reachable from the Chrome's extension management page, or by right clicking on the app icon in the toolbar, as in every others' case. However, I'd find wiser to put a second, almost empty (so as not to make the whole thing look more complicated... :)) horizontal line in the drop-down bar, containing only one small "Settings" link in one side of it, without any icon.
Finally, if I may request some additional functions/icons I miss practically and/or logically from the bar (also extending the functionality towards performing just a bit more tab-related, again in Chrome already existing, but many times annoyingly "hidden" operations):
- open new incognito window
- clear cache
- close tab
- reopen closed tab
- open new tab to the right
- maybe two arrow-like icons for moving the current tab to the left or right end of the tab-bar
- would be great adding the zoombar, e.g. to the right end of the drop-down bar, with the plus, minus, full view, and a middle button leading back to normal 100%
Also, may I recommend some skins to be available for the drop-down toolbar, because this basic and only white is... well, a bit too basic and only. :) Besides, I looked some other extensions of the devs up and, there were options for setting up the appearance as well.