With Android Release of Brave Browser v1.73.89 on Nov 15, 2024, Chromium was upgraded 131.0.6778.69.
Before that, Brave on Android would have a flag called “Bottom Toolbar”, which “displays the toolbar at the bottom” (#android-bottom-toolbar), which would show a new settings letting you choose top or bottom position of the whole search bar.
However, tweaking this setting wouldn’t do anything to Brave, as it would work only on Chrome Canary, because of chromium version.
Since update from Nov 15, 2024, I immediately saw that the toolbar would effectively change position on brave, which is a very good option in my opinion, just like many browsers have the option to do so on IOS.
However, this doesn’t come perfect.
- Info on website settings, with HTTPS, cookie settings would still display at the top (expected behavior ?)
- Clicking Brave Shield Icon doesn’t display the Shield overlay, until you would change the toolbar position to its original place.
- Clicking the tabs button works fine, as expected.
- Clicking the three dots does display the menu correctly but it may need improvements.
- Position of the bar still shows a tiny range of pixels of the page under the search bar
Overall, Brave search bar is unusable with this setting enabled (brave shields, bar disappearing on some webapps,…)
I haven’t tested with other buttons on the toolbar (Brave Ads), because I have them disabled by default, there could be more small issues on them.
Tried out on Brave Nightly and Brave Beta, it works the same, except the entire bar is disappearing after making a search, like on google.fr or brave search.
Thanks for your support, I’m able to give more feedback if needed.