How to Hide the Bookmarks Bar and Taskbar When Screen Sharing
Hide Chrome's bookmarks bar with Ctrl/Cmd Shift B, present from a clean profile, and auto-hide the Windows taskbar or macOS Dock. Those clear the clutter around your content — then blur what's sensitive inside the page.
To clean up the frame before a screen share, hide the browser's bookmarks bar with Ctrl/⌘ Shift B, present from a clean or guest browser profile, and turn on auto-hide for the Windows taskbar or macOS Dock. Those steps clear the clutter and shortcuts around your content. What they can't do is hide sensitive info *inside* the page — that's where an in-page blur like BlurFirst comes in.
There are really two problems hiding inside 'clean up my screen share.' One is the chrome around your content: the bookmarks bar broadcasting your side projects and personal sites, the taskbar showing every app you have open, extension icons hinting at your stack. The other is the content itself. The fixes below handle the first; the last section handles the second.
Hide the bookmarks bar, extensions and taskbar
- 1
Hide the bookmarks bar
Press Ctrl/⌘ Shift B in Chrome, Edge or Brave. The bar — and every bookmark on it — disappears from the top of the window. Press it again to bring the bar back after your call.
- 2
Present from a clean or guest profile
Open a Guest window (profile menu → Guest) or a fresh profile with nothing pinned, no personal bookmarks and no logged-in tabs. This is the cleanest option for demos to clients or an audience.
- 3
Hide the extensions toolbar
In Chrome, click the puzzle-piece menu and unpin icons, or right-click an icon and choose 'Hide in Chrome menu' so your extension list isn't on display.
- 4
Auto-hide the taskbar or Dock
Windows: Settings → Personalization → Taskbar → 'Automatically hide the taskbar'. macOS: press Cmd Opt D, or System Settings → Desktop & Dock → 'Automatically hide and show the Dock'.
A quick reference for the shortcuts
| What to hide | Windows | macOS |
|---|---|---|
| Bookmarks bar (Chrome/Edge/Brave) | Ctrl Shift B | ⌘ Shift B |
| Taskbar / Dock (auto-hide) | Taskbar settings → auto-hide | Cmd Opt D |
| Enter full-screen | F11 | Ctrl ⌘ F |
| Extension icons | Unpin via puzzle-piece menu | Unpin via puzzle-piece menu |
Also worth doing before you present
- Share a single tab or window, not your whole screen — the most effective way to keep the taskbar, Dock and other apps out entirely. See share your screen without showing other tabs.
- Turn on Do Not Disturb / Focus so notification banners don't slide into frame.
- Close unrelated tabs so your tab strip doesn't reveal what else you're working on.
- Set a comfortable zoom level so text is readable for viewers on the far end.
The part these fixes can't reach: content inside the page
Hiding the bookmarks bar and taskbar tidies the frame, but it does nothing about a customer's email in the CRM you're presenting, a salary column in a spreadsheet, or an API key in a dashboard. That content lives inside the page you're deliberately sharing — no browser or OS setting will hide it selectively.
That's the gap BlurFirst fills. It paints a blur into the web page itself before you share, so the sensitive region is baked into whatever gets captured — Zoom, Meet, Teams, Loom, a recorder, even a screenshot of the feed. It's complementary to the browser and OS fixes above: use those for the chrome and desktop, and BlurFirst for what's on the page.
- Box blur — drag a rectangle over a region.
- Element blur — click one field to blur just that.
- Scan (Pro) — auto-detect emails, phones, cards, SSNs and API keys, locally.
- Panic — Ctrl/⌘ ⇧ H blurs the whole page instantly if something appears unexpectedly.