One of the latest features of the Chromium 13 nightly build is a feature called “Compact Navigation”. What this does is add in a context menu menu called “Hide the toolbar”, which does exactly what you think it does.

Before showing exactly how this works, the way to enable this feature is to download the latest build of Chromium, then load the address about:flags in the address bar, enable Compact Navigation, then restart the browser.

Compact Navigation isn’t enabled until you load at least one tab, right-click and then choose Hide the toolbar:

Your tabs then turn into this:

If you click a tab, a floating address bar appears:

For whatever tab you’re currently on, the keystroke CTRL+L also enables the floating address bar.

When you launch a new tab via the add tab button or CTRL+T, the floating address bar appears and waits for you to enter a web address.

Isn’t this the same thing as fullscreen mode?

No. The browser does not command the full screen by use of this feature. You could consider this an ‘in between’ mode of sorts between a regular address bar and fullscreen mode.

Will this be a feature that will be included in future official releases?

That’s indeterminate at this point because it’s so new, but I do admit this is a really good and useful feature that gives you extra vertical screen space.

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