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Some time ago, both Chrome and Chrome Beta started going full-screen. That is, I no longer see my status bar. This is a deal breaker for me, as I can no longer see what time it is or if I have notifications.

I have browsed chrome://flags and didn't see anything related to this.

Is it possible to disable this full-screen mode?

Chrome versions:

  • Chrome (30.0.1599.92)
  • Chrome Beta (31.0.1650.32)

My phone:

  • Galaxy Note 2
  • Android 4.1.2
  • Verizon
  • no custom rom or root
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4
  • According to this post on SO, no... Deactivate “fullscreen” mode on Chrome for Android stackoverflow.com/questions/16962033/…
    – mike.tihonchik
    Oct 24, 2013 at 14:02
  • You can't scroll down just a hair to make your address bar and notifications visible again? (For what it's worth, my Notification bar stays always visible. It's just the address bar that disappears.)
    – ale
    Oct 24, 2013 at 14:18
  • 1
    I'm not referring to the address bar. The notification bar actually disappears, resulting in Android losing it's functionality and becoming more like iOS.
    – user739
    Oct 24, 2013 at 14:26
  • Not seeing that. Perhaps it's a property of the Note 2. Samsung loves to monkey with the UI.
    – ale
    Oct 24, 2013 at 22:46

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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I had the same problem, but I saw the exact moment it happened, a message appeared saying "switching to full screen mode". Then I couldn't switch it off. I deleted all data in Chrome, and the problem was fixed. There was no need to uninstall the app, just cleaned the data using the Android built-in Application Manager. It seems some website included code that caused this, and the Chrome for Android simply does not have the settings to revert this. Hope this helps.

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2

Exactly the same thing just happened to me. Restarting the phone put it back to normal.

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2
  • Excellent! Thanks for the suggestion - worked for me to bring my notifications back! Thanks!
    – AlexC
    Nov 9, 2013 at 15:56
  • So, occasionally I still get "switching to full screen mode" and lose my status bar. It seems that simply killing the task works as well.
    – user739
    Nov 9, 2013 at 19:33
1

I found that if you go to chrome://flags and click "reset all to default" that it will return your status bar. I wasn't able to find any other ways to do that.

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-1

The short answer is no. If you feel that this should be a feature then please file a bug on crbug.com/new and let me know. It should have no effect on scrolling as it keeps all the settings and state exactly the same, if you are seeing problems with scrolling such as events not firing then that is due to the way the compositor works.

The reason why not is that this is a feature on all mobile platforms and we have parity with their way of providing the user with more vertical real estate.

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1
  • 1
    Hi Mike. I'm actually referring to the notification/status bar (with clock) disappearing. It's decidedly un-Android, and seems odd that Google has gone this way. I can enter a bug, but it doesn't seem like a bug. It appears that Google has chosen to "break" Android for just this one app. I'm stumped. Note: The amount of real-estate gained is so minimal, and the amount of functionality lost so great, that I can't imagine this is permanent. There should be some backlash soon.
    – user739
    Oct 24, 2013 at 14:43

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