Google experimented with a bottom address bar forChromeyears ago, and now, the company has finally made it official — on iOS only. Google has announced that starting today, you can optionally move the address bar from the top to the bottom. The option first showed up a few months ago, but it was still locked behind an experimental feature flag.
Google explains that to move the address bar to the bottom, you can simply long-press it and choose a newMove address bar to bottomoption that joins the existingCopy URLbutton. To move it back up, you can follow the same instructions. There is also a newaddress barsection in Chrome’s settings menu that controls the same thing.
If the option doesn’t show up for you just yet, you’ll likely have to wait for an update to roll out on the App Store. Thechrome://flags/#bottom-omnibox-steady-stateflag that you could use to force the bottom address bar in previous releases doesn’t appear to work anymore in our testing.
With the option enabled, you’ll still find the usual navigation buttons at the very bottom (back, forward, new tab, tab switcher, and the overflow menu) with the address bar positioned right on top of them. It’s also still possible to swipe left and right on the address bar to quickly switch between adjacent tabs, which you can also do on Safari (and Chrome on Android, too). In fact, Chrome’s bottom-based interface is almost identical to Safari’s approach.
Google explains the reasoning behind this addition: “We know people prefer different address bar positions depending on the size of their hands and devices, and we took those preferences into account when building this highly requested feature.” Given that Android phones come in even more shapes and sizes than iPhones, it would make sense to bring the feature to Google’s own mobile OS as well.
Two different variations of Chrome for Android’s bottom bar that popped up over the years
A long time ago, Google experimented with a bottom-based interface in Chrome for Android. It went through many different iterations and bore multiple codenames (Chrome Duet being the most recent one), but it never went beyond an experimental stage. Some versions of it even looked like Chrome on iOS looks today, with the address bar at the top and extra options like a share button and the tab switcher at the bottom. Google ultimately stuck with the top-based design on Android, with the last remnants of Chrome Duet deleted in 2020.
It’s surprising that Google hasn’t revisited the idea again. The Android landscape is vastly different in 2023, with foldables changing once again how we hold and use our phones. Flip phones are usually taller than regular smartphones, so a bottom-based interface would make a lot of sense on them. And it’s not like phones have gotten any smaller in the last three years, with many ofour favorite small phonesstill a lot bigger than what many people would comfortably use in one hand.
