Chrome-Duet-Android

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Can anyone please tell me anything about this duet in Chrome://flags in browser on android.  thank you

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Dubbed ‘Duet,’ the design aims to provide a more convenient browsing experience in today’s world of 7-inch smartphones. The big change here is the company’s decision to move many of the browser’s tools and settings to the bottom of the screen, where they can more easily be reached via one-handed use.

https://www.androidcentral.com/google-simplifies-its-upcoming-duet-redesign-chrome-mobile

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Ascaris

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Interesting!

I have an Android tablet from a bunch of years ago. When it came out, Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, was current. It had a tablet mode, using a single bar across the bottom for the action buttons and notifications rather than the twin bars, top and bottom, which was the setup in phone mode. It made sense, since on a phone that is normally held in portrait orientation, it’s the horizontal space in short supply, while in a tablet that is normally held in landscape, it makes more sense to have the bar at the bottom (since there is a ton of horizontal space, and with relatively less vertical space).  Chrome for Android, also, had an option then to turn off the annoying autohiding UI.

Google changed their mind about tablet mode. When the Jellybean update arrived for my tablet, the lovely tablet mode was gone, with the twin bars appearing on my tablet, using up the relatively meager vertical space, and leaving most of both the top and bottom bars empty.  Google’s justification was that if someone who was used to an Android phone were to use a tablet, they might be confused by the repositioning of the buttons to which they were accustomed. Of course, I was right then experiencing a repositioning of the buttons to which I was accustomed, and not only was I not confused (I recognize them even if they are moved to the other end of the screen), I was a bit confused as to why the hypothetical phone user who might want to use a tablet was a greater concern than people who already had tablets, whose reaction to the moved buttons would be, for better or worse, real.

In larger tablets than mine, the tablet mode persisted, but my 7 incher was, as far as Google was concerned, small enough to be deserving of the phone UI, even though I never, ever used it in portrait mode.  My tablet was rooted, so I was able to change the DPI setting to make the OS think I was using a larger tablet, so the tablet UI came back.  Google soon removed that too, consigning all future Android tablet users to an inappropriate phone UI.

Even if their customers were of such a state of mind to not recognize the same buttons moved a few inches over, what would have been wrong with making the phone UI standard and making the Tablet UI available with a pref somewhere?  I guess that’s just not the Google way.  They make the decisions, and if you don’t agree, it’s because you’re wrong, so they would tell you that the answer is to stop being wrong.

Right at about that time, I was trying every mobile browser in growing frustration, finding that not a single one of them was any good (Opera with Presto would have been by far the best, but it hung on most pages, never finishing the page load. Opera had already moved away from Presto then, and the replacement Opera was a huge step down).  I tried Chrome, and I found it to be a fairly unremarkable browser.  Then an update came in, and my setting to keep the URL/button bar from auto-hiding was being ignored. Google had taken that away too.  Phones are short on screen space, so they had to have the hiding UI, and tablets have to be like phones, lest people be momentarily confused for all of five seconds until they figure out where the buttons went (and from then forward, they would no longer be confused about it).  So sayeth Google; so let it be written, so let it be done.

That makes it kind of interesting that the same company has come to realize that larger touch devices and phones are not well served by interfaces designed for phones “just because.” I thought the Android tablet mode was very good for the way I used my tablet. The loss of tablet mode nixed any possibility that I would ever buy another Android tablet (this was back before I was as concerned about Google’s spying as I am now).

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