With phones getting bigger and bigger and our hands staying more or less the same, one-handed navigation of a smartphone is getting extremely difficult these days. While Android phone makers are simply channeling the demand for larger screens, it is up to the app makers to ensure their apps can be used one-handed. And Google, like always, is leading the way.
According to Android Police report, Instead of the address bar at the top of the screen, a new interface under testing is looking at placing the most-used element at the bottom of the screen. “A new flag in Chrome Dev and Canary, only described as ‘Chrome Home,’ moves Chrome’s address bar to the bottom of the screen when enabled,” the report adds. In a screenshot put out by the site, we see controls including search tab, to add tabs as well as to switch tabs at the bottom.
A redesigned feature like this which places app controls at the bottom of the screen has been already put in order by Microsoft for its Windows 10 Mobile’s Edge browser in which the navigation bar is also placed at the bottom of the screen. Apple’s Safari on iOS also places certain browser controls at the bottom of the screen such as switch tabs, navigation, share, and the bookmark option.
Meanwhile, Google announced that it has made Chrome 15 percent faster on Windows under its plans of making the browser hog less memory. Starting with the Chrome 53 release of 64-bit Chrome and version 54 of the 32-bit version, Google has started using Microsoft’s Profile Guided Optimization technology to speed up startup times (by 17 percent), new tab page load times (by almost 15 percent), and overall page load times (by 6 percent) in Chrome, Chrome’s Sébastien Marchand explained.
Google is constantly tweaking its Chrome browser to make the experience better for users. In September, the company announced that it was extending the ‘Data Saver’ technology to videos on the Chrome browser. The feature will allow users to save up to 67 percent data when watching videos encoded in MP4 format. It automatically optimizes HTTP websites and saves 90 percent of the data, while loading pages two times faster. Other than the data saving feature, Google also introduced a new download feature for offline viewing of web pages, pictures, music, and videos. Helpful when the internet connectivity is poor, the feature allows one to download content and save it for later consumption. The company also added a new option to store all the downloaded content right within the Google Chrome app.
Although there is no official word on when the new Chrome feature will be introduced, Google is only testing the feature for now and will roll out the same eventually for mobile users.
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