How to re-enable proper full screen mode in chrome with display of toolbar on hover on macos?

Chrome 69/70 breaks fullscreen mode on mac. Whereas previously you could use a tab in fullscreen mode and hover near the top to reveal all the tabs, now tabs toolbar are either permanently visible in non fullscreen or hidden without a way to access them using the mouse pointer when you enter fullscreen mode.

This reduces screen real estate usability significantly as when you're multitasking you want to switch between tabs only on hover near top of screen and otherwise have the displayport filled with web content. There are LOTS of questions of how to do the opposite(show tabs when in fullscreen) but i prefer the described behaviour which is currently broken.

Show tabs in Chrome full screen mode? for example has only answers about using shortcuts to switch between tabs - this is NOT the behavior i want, i want to be able to hover near the top of the screen to display the available tabs and click on another tab to switch to it.

kkarakk

Posted 2018-10-22T16:47:00.783

Reputation: 167

Answers

Figured it out and wanted to create a question for posterity.

Disable the flag - chrome://flags/#views-browser-windows Enable the flag - chrome://flags/#enable-fullscreen-toolbar-reveal

Go to View Menu and uncheck - Always show Toolbar in Full Screen

You will need to relaunch chrome to see the required functionality enabled again.

P.S.: This also brings back old chrome look without the round edges.

Answer taken from this thread created specifically to fix this issue on google help forums for chrome

edit: this solution is dead on newer versions of chrome(70+) as the required flags have been removed. the chrome devs really don't care about regressions in UI i guess

kkarakk

Posted 2018-10-22T16:47:00.783

Reputation: 167

1Yes, they are rather bad about removing features that everyone likes without warning. – Wayne Walker – 2019-12-13T03:01:56.103

I have a solution for this!

As mentioned in the comment above you can enter chrome://flags/#views-browser-windows It will show you a list of flags and a search field. Just search for toolbar and enable "Immersive fullscreen toolbar".

Maria Hanset Demdal

Posted 2018-10-22T16:47:00.783

Reputation: 71

1#enable-immersive-fullscreen-toolbar flag does work to restore the old functionality of showing the toolbar in fullscreen only upon mouse hover. However, there is a bug where the top 40px of all websites do not receive mouse clicks in this mode (macOS 10.14.6) – nsolent – 2019-12-12T21:12:37.260

yup, not a solution right now. stack itself is hard to use with this flag enabled. – kkarakk – 2020-01-02T16:36:58.017

alternatively, you can leverage on this extension to operate with the tab and address bar in full screen mode.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-url-manager/egiemoacchfofdhhlfhkdcacgaopncmi

lwpro2

Posted 2018-10-22T16:47:00.783

Reputation: 111