Chrome for iPhone now lets you customize the menu bar & carousel

Chrome for iPhone and iPad has introduced a big quality-of-life improvement with the ability to customize the menu bar. 

This is the menu that slides up when you tap the three-dot overflow menu at the right. It’s home to a carousel and the list of various actions. If you scroll down there’s a new “Customize Menu” button

Previously, the top carousel would “Show frequently used items first.” I personally found that constant shuffling annoying and bad for muscle memory. You can now turn off “Smart Sort Menu Bar.”

Save for Settings and Site Information, you can remove everything else from the carousel: Bookmarks, Downloads, History, Password Manager (which has a nice homescreen widget that opens the keyboard when tapped to let you search for stored credentials), Reading List, Recent Tabs, Track Price, and What’s New.

Meanwhile, you can rearrange and uncheck the actions list:

• Follow
• Add to Bookmarks
• Add to Reading List
• Clear Browsing Data
• Translate
• Request Desktop Site
• Find in Page…
• Zoom Text…

This option would be great for Chrome on Android. The overflow menu (on a Pixel 8) spans the entire height of your screen with some scrolling still required. (The option to move the address bar to the bottom would also be nice.)

We’re seeing this option to customize the menu bar on Chrome 125 for iPhone and iPad.

More on Chrome:

• Google is fixing a bug that kept showing blank tabs in Chrome for Android
• You can turn off Chrome’s Help me write suggestion 
• Gemini Nano is coming to Chrome, starting with ‘Help Me Write’
• Chrome wants to add AI features that help make common tasks easier