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Google has been experimenting with Chrome’s design on Android for quite some time now, and the company’s Chrome Duplex experiment has just evolved, in a way. The company has added some new options to Chrome Duplex, though you’ll need to run Chrome Canary build in order to try them out. These new options are available via ‘#enable-chrome-duplex’ flag in ‘chrome://flags’, and if you flip the switch, you will get a new bottom toolbar which basically moves options that are available at the top of the display, to the very bottom of the display, but those options / buttons look a bit different down below.
As you can see in the provided images, you will get four buttons in the bottom toolbar, Home, Google button, tab switcher and a ‘more options’ button. Now, once you scroll down a webpage, both the top and bottom toolbars will disappear until you go back up, which basically frees your whole display for the content you’re browsing. Animations are still included here, and that’s pretty much it. Now, Google Duplex did not come to life until earlier this year, when Google decided to scrap its Google Home options in Chrome. Google Home option basically allowed you to move the top toolbar in Chrome to the bottom, and that’s it. That option was even available in a stable build of Google Chrome, though not in regular options, you still had to dig around Chrome’s ‘flags’ menu for developers. Chrome Duplex is here to replace Chrome Home, basically, even though it seems like Google is trying to achieve something similar here, though it remains to be seen if this option will ever make its way to a stable version of Chrome.
Chrome Home was in development for quite some time, and it seemed like Google was ready to move it as a standard option to a stable build of Chrome, but for whatever reason, that did not happen. Including a toolbar at the bottom of the display actually makes things far more reachable in Chrome, as displays have gotten pretty tall in today’s smartphones, so having a toolbar at the bottom of the display may not be such a bad thing, though Google will probably need to choose between top and bottom toolbars because at the moment both are there, and it definitely seems like an overkill. In the gallery down below, you can see regular Chrome, Chrome Duplex before the change, and Chrome Duplex after the change (with the bottom toolbar).
