Way back in 2020, Android users on Google Chrome cried out in sorrow as the long-developedChrome Duet experiment died out. Duet was a feature flag that users could turn on to move the address bar — or Omnibox — from the top of the screen to the bottom. Google worked on Duet for four years before axing it, and Android users still have no way to move the Omnibox to the bottom on Chrome. However, Chrome on iPhone has given people a way to do just that.
Safari, Apple’s native web browser, has put the address bar at the bottom of the screen for years. Chrome for iPhone has always had its Omnibox at the top, which can be annoying for efficiency. As discovered bySteve Moser of The Tape Drive, iPhone Chrome users can now move the Omnibox from the top to the bottom with a feature flag (via9to5Google).
To try it out, iPhone users should type this address in Chrome:
chrome://flags/#bottom-omnibox-steady-state
Once there, enable the flag. Then, swipe up, close Chrome, and reopen it. The address bar will now be at the bottom.
It’s still under development, and while it’s great in its current state, the top portion of the screen still has a gray background in place of where the Omnibox was. With the Omnibox now at the bottom as well, there’s less screen real estate to browse with. For people who still use the iPhone SE or iPhone 8, it might look fine, but for everyone else that has an iPhone released in 2017 or after that isn’t the SE, it looks bad.
While it’s more standardized to have the address bar be at the top of phone screens, it doesn’t make as much practical sense compared to if it was at the bottom. People naturally hold their phone at the bottom, and their thumb is closer to the bottom by default. That’s part of the reason quick-access apps are located on a bar at the bottom of pretty much all smartphone home screens.
It makes even more sense for the address bar to be at the bottom when using extremely tall phones, like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5. It’s likely for this reason that Samsung Internet, which is the native browser for Samsung smartphones and tablets, already has the option to switch the address bar location on smartphones. Samsung recently added an option tomove the bar to the bottom on tablets, too.
We hope that this is a sign of things to come for Android. While yes, it might have made more sense to add this flag feature to Chrome on Android before putting it on the iOS Chrome app (because, you know, Google owns AndroidandChrome) it shows that the Chrome Duet dream never really died. Maybe it just evolved, and perhaps Google will add the flag on Android soon enough.
