2023 has been abig year for Google Chrome— developers implemented a major visual redesign of several UI elements, added dynamic theming support to the tab bar and new tab page, and made the UI more functional across operating systems. Now, we have spotted Google making another key change to ensure all your on-screen options remain visible, no matter the size of your Chrome window.
Despite Google admitting Chrome is but a vehicle for Search, there’s no denying the browser’s popularity. Developers are hard at work maintaining that status, constantly adding new features.Chrome 118in the stable channel is loaded with new features while guaranteeing a fuss-free user experience. Meanwhile,Chrome 119, currently in beta, is the experimental playground for new Chrome features before their public release. Even before beta testing starts, Google adds (and frequently removes) new features from Chrome Canary, where version 120 is in development at present.
Chrome 120 already revealedplenty of interesting additionslike atransparent navigation barfor Android, but we just came across a new flag called Responsive toolbar for the desktop version of the browser. It is disabled by default and enabling it from the Chrome flags page reveals a new chevron icon between the three-dot overflow menu and your profile switcher icon in the upper right corner of the window.
chrome://flags/#responsive-toolbar
The chevron shows up when you resize the browser window to a smaller size. This forces the Chrome omnibox (address bar) to become smaller. However, the icons beside the omnibox, like this for the profile switcher, Chrome side panel, experiments, etc., have nowhere to go. The browser’s new responsive toolbar stuffs all these shortcut buttons into a drop-down menu which appears when you click the chevron.
Behavior of the responsive toolbar in Chrome 120
A similar implementation is used to contain items overflowing out of yourtab stripand Bookmarks bar when you resize a Chrome window. The new responsive toolbar is particularly useful if you multitask on notebooks with smaller displays or force Chrome to share screen real estate with other windows.
This new change is still in the nascent stages of development, and we aren’t seeing it on all our machines yet. Nonetheless, Google’s flag description suggests the feature is destined for Chrome on Windows, Linux, Mac, and ChromeOS. So, we hope to see it survive until Chrome 120 makes it to the stable version, but Google can always backtrack.
