Chrome for iPhone, but not Android, now lets you have a bottom address bar

Visually, Chrome on iOS is pretty different from the Android version. That disparity continues to grow today with the new ability to move the Chrome address bar on iPhone to the bottom of your screen.

Chrome already has a split bar design on the iPhone. The URL appears at the top, while a toolbar at the bottom is home to back/forward, New Tab (which you can long-press for various search options (Lens, Incognito, and voice), the Tab Switcher, and a three-dot menu. (That overflow menu opens as a full bottom sheet, while the Tab Grid is also rather different compared to Android.)

In moving the address bar to the bottom, it gets combined with the toolbar, just like post-iOS 15 Safari. While there’s no UI at the top of the screen, you can still pull to refresh. 

To change, simply long-press the URL to bring up “Move Address Bar to Bottom/Top.” You can also go to Settings > Address Bar in Chrome 119. The iOS browser also recently introduced a 1×1 homescreen widget that acts as a shortcut to the Google Password Manager.    

Google says this has been a “highly requested feature” and is aware that “people prefer different address bar positions depending on the size of their hands and devices.” 

Of course, the question now is whether this will ever come to Android. In 2016, Google started testing a design that simply moved the address bar (with the tab switcher and overflow menu) to the bottom of the screen. In 2018, Google ended that “experiment” (Chrome Home) for a split toolbar approach (Chrome Duplex). That was later renamed to Chrome Duet, but also never launched and abandoned by mid-2020. 

In 2021, we learned that Chrome Home was abandoned because “mainstream users” said the redesign “felt disorienting.” 

It’s easy to explain this bottom address bar as Chrome’s response to Safari for iPhone. Hopefully, the feedback from iOS owners will result in this change coming to Android as it will greatly help with one-handed usage and reachability.