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Enable the Chrome bottom tab strip.
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A close-up of the eyelash strip. You get a favicon for each tab.
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If you have too many tabs, the tab strip will be scrollable.
Everyone reading this probably uses multiple tabs on a desktop computer, but on mobile devices tab management can be difficult. On an Android tablet, Chrome looks like a real browser with a top tab, but on a phone, you don’t get any kind of tab user interface. There’s a button that will take you to the cascading user interface of different Chrome windows, but a one-touch tab strip hasn’t been around in Chrome for phones – until now!
A new Chrome for Android experiment, first detected by Android Police, will add a tab strip at the bottom of the Chrome window. Tabs take the form of site favicons, and just like on a real computer, a single touch will switch between tabs. The currently active tab has a small close icon next to it, which means that tapping the tab will close it again. An “X” button on the left will close the tab bar completely, while a button on the right will open a new tab.
For now, the feature is in Chrome Beta for some people, and you’ll need to turn on a flag to enable it. To turn it on, paste chrome: // flags / # enable-conditional-strip In the address bar, press enter, enable the flag and restart. Right now it can be a little tricky to appear at first. When I open Chrome the first time, sometimes I have to touch the old window switch button to bring up the tab strip. This is just an experiment, and Android Police says it just doesn’t work for some people. So there is probably also a server side switch involved.
This user interface seems like a great improvement over the current version of Chrome. The lack of a tab strip on mobile devices has made managing multiple tabs a real issue, and Chrome’s window change page has several issues. First, the button (number with a square around it) is on top of the phone, making it difficult to access. Second, it’s just a number, and the lack of page titles or favicons doesn’t provide you with absolutely any context for the other open tabs. Third, it is really difficult to use as it requires tapping the button, scrolling through the list of thumbnails, and another tap to load a new page. All of these issues make Chrome’s “tab” button really easy to ignore and never use.
Faster, easier, closer
The tab strip is faster, easier, and closer to the fingers than the old window switch button. Favicons provide context on which tabs are open and which tabs are easy to close, and the growing line of tabs encourages you to close unwanted tabs. The strip automatically hides like the address bar, appears when you leave the window alone, and flips away when you scroll the page. If you have too many tabs open, you can scroll horizontally across the tab strip with a swipe. If you’ve ever used a desktop browser, you know instantly how this works, and it sounds crazy that it took so long to develop.
Hopefully Google maintains this feature. The Chrome team has been known to launch and then kill experiments like this without reaching the stable channel. The tab strip is built from a previous experiment that enabled tab groups on mobile devices (just like on the desktop), which caused the tab strip to only appear confusingly within a tab group. Now a normal old eyelash strip makes a lot more sense.
Chrome listing image
