Chrome compact mode wants to tighten up your browser UI, pixel by pixel

Early work on the Chrome interface tweak could free up room on the toolbar.

Chrome compact mode wants to tighten up your browser UI, pixel by pixel
  • 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: