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Google Chrome 13 is experimenting with hidden URL bar - How to enable it
Brandon Davenport
When you really think about how the internet works, one thing comes to mind, URLs, and without URLs it would be extreemely hard to navigate the web. The URL toolbar has been the frontman of every browser since the dawn of the modern web, and to build a browser without the URL bar seems to be a crazy endevour, but Google is known for doing these types of things, and so they are attempting to rid Chrome of the URL bar.
We’ve shown you this before
3 months ago, I got wind that Google would be getting rid of the URL bar, and so I posted this mockup I made to Dribbble. What you see in my mockup and what Google has created isn’t all that different and Google seems to be headed in the right direction.
It’s pretty simple how the new URL entry system would work — you open a new tab, the URL bar slides down relevent to the tab’s position and once a URL is entered and the page loads, the URL bar dissapears. You can make it re-appear by clicking the corrosponding tab.
Read more - Our article from 3 months ago
How to set this stuff up
For the past hour or so, I’ve been playing around with the new URL getup and I must say, it’s pretty clean and understandable. Sure it’s pretty rough around the edges and it doesn’t always behave the way it’s suppopsed to, but it’s much more polished than most beta releases (especially for a browser).
1. Download Google Chrome Version 13 (Canary)
2. Install it (you can leave your current build of Chrome running)
3. In the URL bar, enter about:flags
4. Scroll down and enable “Compact Navigation” and re-start the browser
5. Right-click on a tab and select “hide the toolbar”
