You can't change the colour of bookmark folders in Google Chrome.

Google thinks my site will help you change the colour of a Chrome bookmarks folder. They're wrong.

It's true.

You really can't change the colour of bookmark folders.

At the time of writing this (November '21), when you Google "how to change bookmark folder colour" and other similar variations, this website shows up as a nice featured link right at the top of the page. That's awesome for me from a traffic perspective. Actually, it's not. It's bad for everyone involved.

Let me explain:

Sure, the inflated traffic numbers look good on the surface, but it's not benefitting anyone.

Google, generally speaking, do a great job of providing the right content to fit the searcher's needs. There are billions of searches performed everyday on their site, and they've learned how to train machines to figure out what people are looking for, track what they click, if they searched again or if their search intent was satisfied. They use this data to make sure they can provide better and more relevant search results. They're the best at what they do (their >92% global search engine market share speaks for itself), and spend a lot of money and pour a lot of resources into making sure it stays that way.

There are (fairly rare) occasions where they get it wrong. This is one of those times.

To be clear here:

You cannot change bookmark folder colours or the folder icons in Google Chrome.

Not on Windows, not on Mac. It's not possible. (Okay, fine, it might be possible if you know how to write software and how to tweak the Chrome core system files. I've spent time looking into it, willing and ready to learn how to make a complete mess of my browser software, but with no luck. So I've given up.)

Okay, so what should you do?

You have options here. But you might not like them. I've done a (very) small amount of research into changing bookmark folder colours to help you out:

  • Option 1: Use Internet Explorer/Edge (unconfirmed).
    • I read that Internet Explorer uses (used?) an on-hard-drive file system for its assets, which means technically speaking you could find those files on your computer and change them to replace the folders. As for specifics, you're on your own there I'm afraid.
  • Option 2: Give Firefox a go (unconfirmed).
    • This is again unconfirmed, but from my (very small amount of) reasearch I found that Firefox might possibly maybe kinda sorta let you do this if you know how to write software. Again, you're on your own from here.
  • Option 3: Deal with it (confirmed working).
    • For this method, what you do is: suck it up and move on with your life. I know I have, and I can confirm it works wonders. It's admittedly a bit of a shame, and I'll look it up again in the future, but meh, whatever... in the meantime you can vote on this topic to get Google to implement it as a feature. Just don't hold your breath.

Anyway, I'm writing this page for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there's nothing I can do to stop Google sending people here when it's not what they're looking for, so I wanted to at least offer a little bit of help (emphasis on "little bit"). I can't provide a solution, because there seemingly isn't one, but I can at least let you down gently.

Once more: You can't change the colour of a Chrome bookmark folder. Nor its icon.

At some point in the likely-not-too-distant future, Google will realise that this is not what people are looking for, and will update the search results to make them slightly more helpful. Which leads me to the second reason I'm writing this page: to give Google something else to look at on this topic. I'm hoping this page might start to rank instead fo the dot icon page. While this is not inherently helpful, at least I can help give people closure.

While you're here..

You've come this far and presumably read at least some of the words on this page. While I don't have the solution you're looking for to change the colour of a bookmark folder, I will allow myself to assume that you might be the kind of person that's interested in keeping their bookmark bar(s) nice and neat and tidy. Well hey, that's exactly the kind of person that would like this very site! Check out the bookmark seaprators using the menu at the top of the page and see what you think - it might just be the bookmark tool you didn't know you needed until now :)

See ya