Google has quietly abandoned the idea of hiding the location bar to gain more pixel space for web content.
The removal of the web address from the browser window may have been a bit too much, even for Google. The company said that it has canceled the project and the flag “Compact Navigation” as well as the menu tab menu option were removed on July 26. While Google disabled the hidden switch to enable compact navigation as well, the code of the feature itself remains in Chrome. The only way for users to access this feature would be a developer version or nightly build of the browser that was published prior to July 26.
Chrome Compact Navigation
In a discussion thread comment, Google said that “the Compact Nav prototype was meant to be a way for [Google] to try out a new form factor rather than be a permanent redesign. We don’t think that this is the optimal direction to take Chrome’s UI, so the experiment has ended and we’re removing the prototype.”
The radical approach to trim the UI by removing the URL and the location bar from the browser interface sparked heated discussions. The idea was to give the browser a much more app-centric appearance, which, however, would have had massive impact on smaller websites and how they market themselves. It is surprising that Google aggressively removed the feature and did not even leave users an option to hide the location bar. Given Google’s interest to promote Chrome as an essential tool that is binding users to its search and advertising service, this may have been a scary scenario for Google.
We first noticed Google’s ideas to kill the location bar back in February and the feature surfaced in Chrome in May. We actually liked the idea to make the feature to show the URL optional and there appeared to be a clear trend toward this feature as even Mozilla followed up with a similar add-on for Firefox.
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