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Add white space to your browser bookmarks bar

The internet is full of dark patterns, perverse incentives, and slot-machine style interfaces designed to hold your attention while spacefaring billionaires pick-pocket your lunch money.

A crude drawing of a bookmarks bar showing some folders and a bookmark labelled 'enriching activity' with white space on it's left side.

Organizing your browser bookmarks to reduce the friction required achieve your goals is a tiny but effective way of taking back your agency.

Creating a white space in your bookmarks bars so a specific bookmark stands makes it easier to click the thing that you ought to be clicking.

Take control of your destiny — add a space to your bookmarks bar.

How to add a space to your bookmarks bar

Browsers don't have a built in way to create spaces between bookmarks — instead you'll need to create a bookmark to a page with a blank title and a transparent icon.

To make this simple I've created a page on this very website that has no title and transparent icon:

Blank bookmark page

the words book mark this link with an arrow pointing to the link

Adding this bookmark to your bookmarks bar and it will display as a blank space.

Questions I imagine someone might have about this:

What browsers does this work on?

I've tested it on Chrome, Safari, and Firefox — and it works just fine.

The title of the bookmark isn't blank, what do I do?

Some browsers remove any excess white space in the bookmark's title when you save the bookmark. To work around this, simply rename the bookmark adding back the amount of blank space you'd like.

How do I change the size of the blank space bookmark?

Rename the bookmark — adding more spaces will make the bookmark longer.

Why does there need to be a transparent icon?

If there is no icon the browser will create a default icon — so creating a blank bookmark requires a blank icon.

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