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.
