The first thing I do after installing a web browser is turn off the bookmarks bar. It consumes precious screen area, and makes the viewport more squashed than it needs to be, for very little payback: You can fit at most 8 bookmarks on that bar.

Since I switched to widescreen LCD panels this year, I always have the sidebar open in Firefox. It gives me access to three lists: Bookmarks, History and RSS, all with search capability. I can create hierarchical lists of bookmarks and keep things organized easily.

There is another reason why I need that sidebar: With the browser maximized at 10:6, webpages are rendered too wide. As a paragraph gets wider, it becomes more and more difficult to read the lines without "losing your place"... there's a reason why newspaper collumns are so narrow, you can read them faster.

I think Google Chrome should have a single icon, (between reload and bookmark?), that opens a sidebar with at least two icons: bookmarks and history, both of which are searchable.

Obviously it's early days yet (0.3x) and I have high hopes that a sidebar will be added eventually, wether as part of the core app or as a plugin.