Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR
- An in-development Chrome “compact mode” could tighten up toolbar rendering.
- Saving a few pixels here and there may allow for more toolbar elements, or just extra room for web pages.
Whether you’re looking at a laptop screen or a desktop monitor, displays these days are cheaper, better, and bigger than ever. While that may mean that you’re no longer constantly hunting for free screen real estate like you were in years past, developers are still concerned with efficiency of design, and that extends to the UIs of the software we use. Chrome could soon find itself offering you the ability to tighten up its interface just a little bit, if the changes we’re looking at today come to be adopted.
Chrome expert Leopeva64 posts on X about the changelist he uncovered in the Chromium Gerrit, showing early work towards a possible “compact mode” for the browser:
The actual changes to browser layout this mode would involve are really, really small — on the level of a few pixels here and there. It would reduce the height of things like the bookmarks toolbar, tighten up padding between on-screen elements, and shrink margins. But the cumulative effect of all those tiny space gains would save room for more stuff on the toolbar, bookmarks bar, and ultimately offer more screen space for rendering web pages themselves.
Minor change though this may be, it’s a good reminder that we needn’t get too complacent with the software we use just being the way it is, looking the way it looks, and working the way it works — not without considering that there might be some easy, low-effort ways of doing things just the smallest bit better. We don’t know yet if this Chrome compact mode would definitely be a benefit or not, but it sounds like the sort of harmless tweak that’s at the very least worth testing and considering.
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