The Google Chrome user interface has always followed a model of minimalism. The Chrome developers have sought to cut the cruft as much as possible to slim down the parts of the browser window that don't show content. They could soon take it to the next level by excising the traditional navigation toolbar.

A new experimental user interface option that has landed in early pre-release builds of Chrome 13 offers a first look at what they have in mind. The browser navigation toolbar can be completely hidden, leaving only the tab bar, menu button, and content area. The forward and back buttons are moved into the tab bar, placing them in the top-left corner of the window.

To access the URL textbox, the user has to click a browser tab. This will cause a floating navigation bar interface with a URL textbox and refresh button to drop down from the tab. The floating bar will remain on the screen as long as the textbox is active, but it will slide back up and disappear after a few seconds when the textbox doesn't have focus and the cursor is out of range.

We tested this feature ourselves using the Canary build channel on Windows. The feature isn't yet supported on Mac OS X. It's obviously still very experimental and isn't configured out of the box. To test the new hidden navigation bar, you have to enable the feature from the about:flags panel and then toggle it from the tab context menu.

This new streamlined navigation bar obviously poses some phishing risks, because it doesn't make the domain and SSL status of the current site easily visible to users. It's important to remember, however, that it's still at an early stage of development is only being made available as an option rather than a default.