I would be completely lost without my Bookmarks Toolbar at the top. Sometimes I wish it could be two rows.
Every one of my top pages is there that I frequent. I also have my social bookmarking links in there for saving pages for later. I have my main folders there with my other Work/News/Research links in them for quick reference too.
I'm agreeing with Cory on this one: the bookmarks bar should be made obsolete, or at least be hidden by default. Browsers, especially FF, but including Safari and Chrome, allow you to easily search bookmarks from the location bar by title of the page or URL. Aside from that, Chrome offers you the top pages tab page + if the bookmarks bar is hidden, it displays the Bookmarks bar as part of the new tabs page.
I'd love to see the statistics for this, but if most people, like me, only click items on the bookmarks bar upon opening a new tab, then, indeed, there is no sense in keeping it up in the toolbar by default.
Only showing the bookmarks bar after opening a new tab is much less efficient for my case: I have a number of bookmarks that I want to open in tabs, but it's a varying subset of the toolbar set.
To do it I now I just command-click all the bookmarks I want opened, and they open in background tabs. To do it with a hidden bookmarks bar I'd need to open a new tab first, then click.
Perhaps I'm weird (I've been accused of that before :-D), but I organize bookmarks into folders on the bookmarks toolbar (the folder is some topic which groups the links together for me according to some connection between them that is logical to me). For most bookmarks, two clicks and I'm in (even for those URLs I only use once every month or two). Even with the location bar searching on every keystroke, I still think I'd lose efficiency if the bookmarks bar went away. Plus the location-bar-based search doesn't help me if I know what general 'topic' a link fits into, but I can't remember anything about the site name or URL. Location bar auto-searching is nice, but I don't think it solves every bookmark-searching scenario.
I agree, if I don't have a visual reference in front of me I forget some of the many sites that are important for me to get to.
You can get three rows of books marks up top: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13923/add-a-scrollable-multi-...
I like this with a theme that minimizes the icons and text of the bookmarks. It hardly wastes any space this way.
Sure. I use multiple browsers each day for various reasons. It's hard enough keeping bookmarks synced. Top site pages are also largely useless in that they only keep the most visited pages. I have numerous work pages I visit often that get placed at the top. Numerous news pages, numerous blogs. In each case, I'd rather have some form of context.
For example, I don't need the dial telling me about HN, Reddit, ArsTech, and other tech news sites individually. At the very least, I'd like to just select news sites, and have the browser deal with it intelligently.
The dial is useful, don't get me wrong. But it's far shy of a replacement for bookmarks.
I realize I also might be the exception to the rule. =)
Every one of my top pages is there that I frequent. I also have my social bookmarking links in there for saving pages for later. I have my main folders there with my other Work/News/Research links in them for quick reference too.