Technology

Google Chrome to get a transparent navigation bar on Android

Google Chrome is all set to get a transparent navigation bar for its Android app. This feature is currently available for beta users. By enabling this feature, you enhance the look of your device through a full-screen experience that makes it look premium. After completing the development process, this feature might be fully rolled out in the coming weeks.

As per news via @Nail_Sadykov, this latest feature is available in Chrome beta version 114. Although this feature needs to be enabled manually, By enabling this feature, restart Chrome, and you’ll get a transparent navigation bar at the bottom of the bar. You can enjoy this other than a solid bar at the bottom.

With three buttons for navigation, this feature is inoperative. This is so because the bottom bar in this instance has buttons that can be touched. It would be redundant and cluttered to display content behind them. On the other side, the navigation bar doesn’t include any tappable buttons. As a result, you can even interact with UI components there. The initial solution, which is only available for the home page and web pages, isn’t ideal. However, Google would be striving to make it better. On iPhones, Chrome already provides a translucent navigation bar.

Other Android apps should enable a transparent navigation bar

The transparent bar feature has been an Android feature since 2019. This feature came with the launch of Android 10. In parallel to this launch, gesture navigation was introduced by Google, which allowed the app developers to work on transparent navigation bars.

But over the course of four years, not many apps have adapted this feature. It appears that Google has acted independently. To give you a full-screen experience while utilizing gesture navigation, the majority of Android OEMs already provide the option to hide the bottom bar. However, it would be wonderful if more software developers made their navigation bars invisible. It differs from completely concealing the bottom bar, after all.

Google, however, now lets anyone force a transparent navigation bar in any program with Android 14. This developer feature enables a consistent visual experience by allowing the UI to color-match the rest of the app rather than drawing it behind the bottom bar. The unpleasant issue of UI inconsistencies amongst apps that don’t use dynamic color tuning is undoubtedly something Google is working to address. Ideally, developers would implement it on the back end as well