Back in September this year, Google introduced a new grid tab layout, tab hover previews, in-search answers, and tab grouping on Chrome for Android. Earlier this month, the company started testing a new UI for Chrome's new tab page on Chrome Canary. It seems like the duet tab strip flag has finally made it to the dev version of Chrome and you can now enable it on the latest update.

As per a recent report from 9to5Google, the latest update for Chrome now has the experimental enable-duet-tabstrip-integration flag which can be enabled in the chrome://flags page. Once enabled, the flag moves the browser's UI from the top of the screen to the bottom, making it easier to access on large devices. The UI is much smaller than what we've seen earlier and it shows a "strip" of favicons from tab groups floating right above the tab count button. The new tab button can also be found on the same strip with a down arrow to hide the strip.

Once the strip has been hidden, you can open it again by long-pressing on the tab count. Upon adding more tabs to the tab group, the strip gets wider to accommodate the new tabs and allows you to scroll to the side when you run out of room. There's one major issue with the new UI though. As the tab strip only shows favicons, there's no way to differentiate between two tabs from the same website as they have the same favicon. This makes it difficult for users to find the tab they're looking for in case there are multiple tabs from the same website. Thankfully, you still get the option to preview each tab's title and thumbnail from the main tab switcher UI which makes the task a bit easier. As of now, the new UI is still in the testing phase and there's no word from Google regarding its release to the stable version of Chrome on Android.


Source: 9to5Google