Don’t like the persistent download bar in Google Chrome? Here’s a simple way to auto hide download bar in Chrome after some time.
Chrome is my daily browser. Along with a lot of useful built-in features, there are a ton of extensions for all kinds of things. I use it for a lot of things from web apps to development to regular browsing. Compared to the previous versions, Google has also improved the built-in download manager and it now downloads files faster and more reliably.
Though the built-in Chrome download manager works as intended, one of the annoyances of it is the download bar. When you try to download a file in Google Chrome, it will show a download bar at the bottom of the window with the file download progress. Unless you manually close the download bar, it doesn’t go away even after the download is completed or canceled.
So, if you are like me who doesn’t like the persistent Chrome download bar at the bottom of the window then follow the below steps to automatically hide Chrome download bar.
Hide Download Bar in Chrome Browser
Now, other than manually clicking on the little X icon, there is no built-in option to hide the download bar in Chrome. However, like for many things, there is an extension that can do the work for us. To be more specific, we are going to use the Autohide Downloads Bar extension.
1. First, open the Chrome browser if it is not already opened. Next, go to this page and click on the “Add to Chrome” button. In the next prompt, click on the “Add extension” button.
2. After installing the extension, click on the extension icon appearing on the address bar and select “Options”.
3. By default, the extension automatically closes the downloads bar after six seconds. If you want to change that, enter the number of seconds in milliseconds in the available field and click on the “Save” button. Since I want to hide downloads bar in Chrome after one second, I entered 1500 (1.5 secs) in the field.
That is all. From now on, the download bar will be hidden according to your time setting. Even after closing the download bar, any active download(s) will continue in the background. You can access the downloads page by pressing the Ctrl + J keyboard shortcut or by going to “Menu (three vertical dots) → Downloads”.
Hope that helps. It is that simple to hide downloads bar in Chrome. If you are stuck or need some help, comment below and I will try to help as much as possible.
If you like this article, do check out how to disable new Chrome tab hover cards.
