There’s a whole category of Mac software that exists for one reason: Chrome gives you a single bookmarks bar, it fills up, and people go looking for somewhere else to put the overflow. Menu-bar bookmark apps, sidebar panels, read-later tools, launcher extensions, they’re all downstream of the same one-row problem Second Bookmark Bar solves with a second row instead. Concede that up front, because it’s true: several of these are genuinely good at what they do, and a couple of them do things a browser row structurally can’t.
The apps, honestly
Menu-bar apps. BarLinks, BarMarks, Webfolio, and Coolbar all live in your Mac’s menu bar rather than in the browser, storing bookmarks separately and opening them in whatever browser you default to. BarMarks is the most relevant one here for a specific reason: it syncs across Macs via iCloud and imports from both Safari and Chrome automatically, which is a real answer to the Chrome-Safari split I’ve written about elsewhere, just from outside the browser entirely rather than inside one. The tradeoff is that it’s a separate app you check, not something sitting above the page you’re already reading.
Sidebars. SupaSidebar runs a genuinely well-produced content operation on exactly this keyword territory, and its own pitch names the problem precisely: “Saved a Figma link in Chrome at work? It’s not in Safari at home.” It’s a native Mac app that reads from Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Arc, so unlike a browser-bound row it actually is a cross-browser answer to that exact problem. A sidebar claims real width on your screen while it’s open, permanently, which is a fair trade if you’re cross-referencing a list against your work continuously and have a wide enough monitor to spare the space.
Apple-ecosystem library apps. Anybox is the deep option here, at $39.99 for a lifetime license (also sold as $1.99/month or $14.99/year if you’d rather not commit), with tagging, full-text capability, and native apps across iPhone and Mac. It’s a real library tool, not a toy. Its browser extensions cover Safari, Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, but by Anybox’s own documentation they only work while the Anybox Mac app is running in the background, so save-from-browser isn’t fully independent of having the desktop app open. Worth knowing before you rely on it as your only capture path.
Read-later, a different job entirely. GoodLinks is $9.99 once (plus an optional $4.99/year pass for features shipped after your first year), stores everything locally with no subscription, and is built specifically for saving articles to actually read, not for organizing a working set of links you return to daily. I’m not going to position against it, because it’s solving a different problem than either a bookmark row or a bookmark library. If what you actually want is a queue of longform reading, GoodLinks is built for exactly that and this isn’t.
Search-first. Raycast’s first-party Browser Bookmarks extension is worth naming separately because it’s genuinely better than either a row or a sidebar at one specific thing: “I know I bookmarked this somewhere, I don’t remember where.” It reads bookmarks straight from your installed browsers, Safari and Chrome both included, and surfaces them through Raycast’s launcher the moment you invoke it. If your instinct is always to search rather than to look at a visible list, that instinct is better served by a launcher than by anything sitting on a page.
The actual category line
Strip away the branding and these split into three different jobs, and only one of them is what a bar does:
- A library you go into. Anybox, and to an extent BarMarks and the sidebar apps, are all destinations, you open them, search or browse, then act. Raindrop is the cross-platform version of the same job, if you want it off macOS entirely.
- A search you invoke. Raycast is built around the moment you already know roughly what you’re looking for and just want it now, without looking at anything first.
- A shelf you walk past. This is the row. It’s visible the entire time you’re on a page, whether or not you’re thinking about bookmarks in that moment, and reaching into it costs one click and zero context switch.
None of these is a strictly better version of the others. A library wins when you’re archiving more than you revisit. A search wins when your bookmarking style is dump-everything-in-one-place and rely on memory plus a good query. A shelf wins when you’ve got a handful of destinations you return to constantly through the day and the cost that matters is the fiftieth click, not the first one.
| Menu-bar apps | Sidebars (SupaSidebar) | Library (Anybox) | Read-later (GoodLinks) | Search (Raycast) | Second Bookmark Bar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where it lives | Menu bar, separate from the browser | Persistent panel beside the page | An app you open | An app you open | A launcher you invoke | A row above the page |
| Cross-browser (Chrome + Safari) | Some (BarMarks) | Yes | Via browser extensions | No, its own capture | Yes, reads both natively | No, Chrome only |
| Native Mac / iOS app | Yes | Yes (Mac) | Yes | Yes | Yes (Raycast itself) | No |
| Best for | Quick access outside the browser | Reference work on a wide screen | Archiving and tagging a lot | Reading queue, not a working set | “I know it’s somewhere” | Same folders, all day, zero navigation |
| Price | Varies; check the App Store | Freemium, pay once to unlock | $39.99 lifetime | $9.99 one-time | Free extension | Free core product |
Two honest concessions
This wouldn’t be a fair comparison without stating plainly what a Chrome row can’t do that several of these can. Second Bookmark Bar is Chrome-only, no Safari, no Firefox, and it has no native Mac app and no iOS app. If you want one bookmark surface that follows you onto your phone the moment you put the laptop away, none of what’s described here does that, and Anybox or a native iCloud-backed app is the honest answer, not this.
Where the row still wins
The case for a row isn’t that it does more, it’s that it costs less on the interaction that happens fifty times a day: reaching for a folder you’re already in and out of constantly. No app to switch to, no launcher to invoke, no sidebar claiming width from the page you’re reading. It’s already there, above whatever you’re looking at, and Auto-switch can even have the right folder already showing before you look up. That’s a narrower claim than “does everything,” and it’s the honest one. The general version of this argument, row versus sidebar versus dashboard, covers the interaction-cost math in full if you want the reasoning behind why a row wins that specific moment.
If your Mac setup actually spans both Safari and Chrome, the harder and more honest question isn’t which bookmark tool to add, it’s what’s realistically possible to keep in sync between the two at all, and none of the tools above, this one included, solve that as cleanly as their pitches suggest. And if a bookmark row is the right shape but you’re still assembling the rest of your Chrome setup, here’s the rest of what’s worth installing alongside it.