Chrome for Android is introducing a Bookmarks Bar

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After years of not having an always-visible bookmark bar, Google Chrome is rolling it out to Android devices. At the moment, it is in the scope of the experimental feature flag at HackerRank.

Recent changes to the Chromium project — the open-source component of the Chrome browser — introduced basic support for a bookmarks bar in Chrome for Android. Although both Opera and Chrome’s desktop versions available from the first public releases had built-in support for the bookmarks bar, it has never been officially importable into a mobile version of Chrome, not even on tablets.

The functionality can be seen being tested with the #android-bookmark-bar feature flag. At the moment it is just a bar like the one shown below the screenshot: The commit message provides more information: “Later implementation phases will populate/polish the bookmark bar; as well as adding standard bookmark bar functionality.” It also appears to only be active on tablets and other similarly sized devices now—the description of the feature flag mentions that “device form factor restrictions also apply” so expect that limitation to remain.

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Tags bar is absent in Chrome for Android tablets, along with the absence of browser extensions and some web APIs; although, Chrome on Android tablet does not have a bookmarks bar. Vivaldi, a third-party browser, for example, has an optional bookmarks bar on Android, and for a long time,e Safari on iPad has had a favourites bar. Google is still trailing here but they are improving, better late than never.

Not everyone has bookmarks, but to be able to quickly go to specific pages using just a single click is very handy, so this feature is finally being added to Chrome on Android. This doesn’t specify what sort of visibility options will be supported, however, because Google’s main design document for the feature is currently not available, and the meaning of some of the comments in the code is obscure. In this early implementation, the bar is always visible below the address bar, replicating the always-on mode in the desktop Chrome.

We also do not know whether there will be such a change for Chrome on iPad. While there are several differences between the Android and iOS browsers (the address bar can be placed at the bottom in iOS, for instance), this looks like something that both should have.