Chrome for Android gets a customizable shortcut in the address bar
Google is still experimenting with the Chrome interface, although a lot of that testing ends up being canceled – looking at you, Chrome Duet. While the bottom navigation interface is probably gone for good for now, the company continues to test other new features, and the latest change to the toolbar is a customizable shortcut between the toolbar. address and the tab selector.
For some people, Chrome Beta 92 added a new button between the address bar and the tab picker – a new tab shortcut for some and a share option for others. We’ve seen Chrome experiment with these layouts before, but it looks like there’s more to this random a / b testing. As one of our readers shared with us, you can customize the button in Chrome Canary 93 (93.0.4536.2 and later, to be precise). By default, you’ll get a button that matches your usage, but you can also choose to have the new tab shortcut, share button, or a hard-coded voice search option instead.
The toolbar options can be found in the settings under Advanced -> Toolbar shortcut. If they are not showing to you in Canary yet for some reason, you can also activate the entry by activating two indicators: chrome: // flags / # adaptive-button-in-top-toolbar and chrome: // flags # adaptive-button-in-top-toolbar-customization.
While the controls are incredibly finicky right now, with the underlying algorithm mostly suggesting an out-of-the-box voice search for us and the shortcut even sometimes disappearing altogether, the customizable element is a nice addition to Chrome. It certainly reminds us a bit of Vivaldi, a Chromium-based competitor with incredibly versatile interface tuning options, and can only make us dream of even more customization opportunities coming to Chrome.
You can download the latest version of Chrome Canary from the Play Store or from APK Mirror.