An early look at Chrome for Android’s bottom address bar [Gallery]

Abner Li | Oct 12 2024 - 7:37 am PT

In recent weeks, Chrome for Android started working on a bottom address bar, and an early look is now available.

With the latest version of Chrome Canary today, the bottom address bar is live. It’s really quite straightforward, with Google just moving the browser ‘chrome’ to the bottom of your screen.

Of course, Chrome’s very first attempt at this design in 2016 was also straightforward, but Google added more and more complexity over time, including a bottom bar and later a split bar design.

So far, there are no other UI accommodations with the three-dot overflow menu unchanged and still ordered from top-to-bottom. Additionally, there are no changes to the tab switcher. It remains to be seen whether any of that will be updated as it’s still early days for this design.

As of this build (131.0.6772.0) and Android 15 QPR1 Beta 2 on a Pixel 9 Pro, the gesture handle overlaps but it’s otherwise usable.

After installing Chrome Canary from the Play Store, which is experimental, buggy, and not recommended as a day-to-day browser, enable this flag:

chrome://flags/#android-bottom-toolbar

Top comment by Lucas de Eiroz Rodrigues

Liked by 16 people

Finally.

View all comments

Restart the browser, go to Settings > Address bar, and choose “Bottom.”

Last year, Chrome for iOS introduced a bottom address bar. It’s likely that the current work on Android will actually launch this time. As we previously wrote in July, Chrome for Android should have this option for a bottom address bar. However, it’s important that Google does not redesign the entire browser along the way and hinder its existing simplicity:

What I want Chrome to try is putting the exact same bar we have today at the bottom of the screen as an option to improve one-handed usage and reachability. To be clear, I don’t want Google to redesign the entire browser UI as part of this.