Microsoft really wants Google Chrome to use Windows 11-themed
scrollbars, or at least the company is making sure users can
enable the newly updated scrollbars by turning on flags in the
experimental flags menu. The company is baking this feature
into Chromium and Chrome could soon adopt it.
So what exactly is a fluent scrollbar? As per Microsoft, the
modern scrollbar is inspired by its Fluent Design and it simply
means that the scrollbar on the right side of the browser would
be a very thin line. It would pop into existence when you hover
over the bar, thus resulting in a neat or “modern” experience.
At the same time,
Microsoft’s Fluent scrollbars provide more real estate to
render the contents of the website you’re browsing. Microsoft
has been working on Fluent and overlay scrollbars since the
summer of 2021 and the tech giant promised that it would add
back this functionality to Chromium.
It looks like the browser will be updated with proper
implementation of Fluent scrollbars in the near future because
a fresh patch in Chromium Gerrit has added the base of the
Fluent scrollbar bar.
“Fluent scrollbar base feature This CL adds a Fluent scrollbar
base feature and implements unit tests. FluentScrollbar feature
depends on OverlayScrollbar feature state,” Microsoft stated
in the code commit.
This suggests that new Fluent scrollbars will soon be tested in
Chrome (presumably beginning with Canary), but there’s no ETA
at the moment.
Chrome recently received a big update
Google recently shipped Chrome version 102 with major
enhancements for web apps, tabs, and more. As part of Chrome
102, Google added new keyboard shortcuts to speed up your web
navigation. With the new shortcuts “Ctrl+Shift and Page Up or
Page Down”, it is now possible to rearrange tabs without your
mouse.
For web apps, Google has enabled a new feature that would allow
developers to declare their web apps’ ability to open certain
files. As a result, web apps can now appear as an option in the
“Open With” menu.
There’s a new Navigation API that lets you easily navigate
within web apps. The API promises a smooth transition between
pages of the web apps without loading the entire page.
