Home button in Google Chrome for Android is making a return

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Google is constantly experimenting with new features and design tweaks for its Chrome browser. Usually, the interface changes are pretty minor, but sometimes they’ve been rather expansive such as the experimental Chrome Home interface which has been deprecated in favor of a new split toolbar ‘Chrome Duplex‘ interface. Another change that to the interface that has caused a lot of strife among users is the removal of the home button in the toolbar.

The home button is a standard feature of most web browsers, and even Google Chrome on desktops still has the button. Pressing the button launches the user’s designated home webpage. It can be a convenient way to quickly return to a webpage that you frequently check. My home page is set to XDA-Developers because I’m frequently coming back to check on the new articles and comments on the Portal. For whatever reason, Google removed the home button in an earlier version of Chrome for Android, but it appears that a new feature flag is rolling out that allows you to bring it back.

On the latest nightly release of Chromium browser and Chrome Canary, a new flag has been added called “Force Enable Home Page Button.” This flag can be accessed by copying and pasting the following into the address bar:

chrome://flags#force-enable-home-page-button

Enabling this flag and then restarting Chrome twice will bring back the home page button as shown in the screenshots above. Restarting Chrome twice means you’ll have to open the browser and then force close it after the initial restart occurs when you modify the flag. For those of you who miss the home button, this new feature should eventually make its way over to the beta and stable release channels, so keep an eye out for when it does.