A common annoyance that I’ve finally found a fix for is this: Google Chrome, for all its virtues, likes to open up a download shelf at the bottom of your window whenever you download anything.
This is a royal pain in the ass if you don’t have a magically infinite monitor, since it takes up a surprising amount of real-estate without
- Offering up sufficient functionality
- Any obvious/easy way to disable this behaviour
Well, you’re in luck. The way I’ve come upon to “fix” this is really simple, with exactly three steps:
- Go to
chrome://flags/from the Chrome URL bar/”Omnibox”. - Scroll down to “New Downloads UI” and click on “Enable”.
- Restart Chrome.
Find the "New Downloads UI" and don't touch anything else on this page.
Once you’ve set this up, when you download things you will no longer get that annoying shelf at the bottom of the window. If you want to access your downloads, you can still do so by hitting Shift + Cmd + J (OS X), or Ctrl + J (Windows). I personally use that tab so much that I’ve got an extension that puts an entry in my context-menu to open up the Downloads tab.
Now you are a winner too.