Drop down menus have been a part of graphical computer interfaces since the beginning, but they aren't particularly easy to interact with on touchscreens. Google is working on getting rid of them with a few measures on Android, such as moving the password autofill dropdown to a bar on top of Gboard. But it looks like the company also wants to further reduce the number of dropdowns you come across when you surf the web in Chrome.

When you fill in data on certain websites, such as in the search bar of our sister site APK Mirror, your queries are saved to your browser and then offered as suggestions when you return later. Usually, a collection of these queries appears as a dropdown menu below the entry form, but now, a new variant has popped up for some people that moves the suggestions to a strip on top of the keyboard as part of a browser experiment.

Left: Current suggestions. Middle & Right: New suggestions.

The new "dropdown" list, if you can even call it that, lives in the same strip on top of your keyboard as the rest of the Chrome autofill suggestions like those for addresses, passwords, and payment methods. In fact, the new dropdown format will only appear when you've turned on at least one of these autofill option in Chrome settings. If you've got that activated and the new look still doesn't appear for you, you'll also need to turn on the flag specified below if the new suggestion strip doesn't appear for you automatically.

Autofill suggestions as keyboard accessory view

Shows Autofill suggestions on top of the keyboard rather than in a dropdown. – Android

chrome://flags/#autofill-keyboard-accessory-view

This flag has been part of Chrome for Android for a long time — we first spotted it back in 2015, when it was responsible for moving password and credit card suggestions to the strip on top of the keyboard. However, it looks like Google is only now starting to roll out these website-specific suggestions to the bar, without requiring everyone to manually turn on the corresponding flag.

We can confirm that this new look is rolling out in the latest stable release of Chrome, version 90, which should be on your phone already by now. If not, you can get it from APK Mirror.

Google Chrome: Fast & Secure Developer: Google LLC
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