Google Chrome is the most used web browser in the internet world. The reason for its huge popularity is, it provides a lot of basic to advanced features to its users. The feature-rich Chrome has many in-built options that help the users enhance their internet browsing experience.
Even after being advanced than its counterparts and having a lot of options, Chrome lacks one essential option that most of its users wanted. This option is the ability to hide Address Bar or the URL bar. The option was available sometimes back in an experimental feature. However, now it is missing and unavailable even on the beta version of Chrome.
Many Chrome users would like to hide the address bar on the browser because of the following reasons:
- Don’t want any distractions while reading or browsing something on the internet.
- To hide the URL from the people around.
- To expand more space for the web page vertically.
- Some people like the minimalistic design, so they don’t want anything extra on the browsing screen.
If you are one such user who needs to hide address bar in Chrome browser, this guide will help you to achieve that.
Let us discuss the three possible ways to hide address bar in Chrome.
Table of Contents
Enable the Full-Screen Mode
Enabling the full-screen mode while the Chrome browser is active would hide the address bar and the tab navigation.
- Launch Google Chrome
- Open the desired website that you wish to browse without the address bar.
- Now, press the F11 key on your keyboard, present at the topmost row.
- Pressing the F11 key would enable the full-screen mode and hide the address bar in Chrome, leaving only the content of the webpage visible.
Create Shortcut
Time needed: 5 minutes
Though there is no option to hide the address bar in Chrome, users can achieve the same through a different feature of Chrome known as Create Shortcut. The Create Shortcut option lets users create a desktop shortcut of their favorite website or the site they frequently visit. This shortcut would open the intended website without any address bar or navigation. To create a shortcut of any site, follow these steps:
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Launch Google Chrome and visit the website of which you want to create a shortcut.
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Click on three-dots at the top right to launch the options menu
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Hover the pointer over More tools and choose the Create shortcut option.
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From the popup, enable the Open as window option and click create.
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The webpage will be opened in a new Window without any address bar or tabs.
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The website shortcut would be saved on your desktop that you can access anytime and enjoy the minimalistic Chrome browsing.
Change the properties of Chrome Shortcut
By modifying the Chrome browser’s shortcut, you can open it as an app window without any address bar. It is similar to the previous method, in which we have to create a shortcut of the website.
- Right-click on the Chrome Browser’s shortcut on the desktop and select Properties.
- Replace the current Target address with this one: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –app=”http://example.com“. In place of example.com, you can insert the URL of your choice, like Google.com.
- Apply the settings and click Apply and OK.
- Launch Chrome Browser. It would be opened without any address bar.
Final Words
Hiding an address bar can be beneficial in maintaining the focus and enhance productivity while working on something essential. Though there is no direct option, extension, or flag to hide address bar in Chrome, you can temporarily or even permanently hide the URL bar by following any of the options explained in this guide.
