PSA: Moving Chrome’s Address Bar to the Bottom no Longer Causes Visual Bug

Google’s Chrome browser has been the most popular web browser in the world for a few years now, and its dominance is even more pronounced in Android. Although Chrome aims to be a one-size-fits all browser, some users prefer using third-party browsers (most of which are based on the Chromium open source project) for added features or to experience a different UI design.

Some popular web browsers allow you to place the address bar at the bottom – a useful option for those of us with larger phones. For a long time, this wasn’t possible in Google Chrome. But early last November, Google added an experimental flag called Chrome Home to Chrome Dev and Canary.

chrome://flags/#enable-chrome-home

When enabled (just click the link above in your browser), the browser would display the entire address bar at the bottom of the screen rather than its typical place at the top. It was a dream come true for big phone users – except for one major problem.

Yeah, the browser would render a blank space for where the address bar used to be. This blank space would take up quite a sizable portion of any webpage – and it was a definite eyesore. I’m sure many of our readers who heard of this tip, myself included, immediately disabled the flag once they realized how much precious screen real estate they were losing.

But fortunately, it looks like this visual bug has been fixed. We don’t know exactly when it was fixed as each Google Chrome channel receives frequent updates (and likely most people disabled this flag and never bothered to re-enable it), but we can confirm that this bug is fixed in the Beta, Dev, and Canary channels.

Unfortunately, the stable channel of Google Chrome is still stuck on version 55 of Chromium, which does not contain this flag at all. But if you are running one of either the Beta, Dev, or Canary builds, then the Chrome flag should be working properly now. I’ve been running it today and haven’t encountered any major issues so far, which is a good sign, but remember that any flag you enable is considered experimental so you should assume that it won’t run perfectly.

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