Chrome Beta for Android is hiding a full-screen mode

It looks like Google has hidden an Easter egg in the latest Google Chrome beta release for Android. Users have discovered that the beta version of the browser now comes with a full-screen browsing mode.

The beta version of Chrome was released by Google in order to test new features to eventually be added to the stable version. The discovery was made by Reddit user Smackel, who found this bug after a quick-fire update for Chrome Beta was released. To enable this mode, you have to start the browser and type in ‘chrome://flags’ in the URL bar. Enable the option for WebGL after scrolling down. Restart your browser once you are prompted to.

A fun experiment!

Head to the Chrome experiment called Boids and Buildings, where this bug was discovered by Smackel. According to the author of the experiment, Boids and Buildings is a “procedural city constructed and animated in realtime, watched over by procedural boids.” The experiment essentially allows a city of lines to be drawn on your screen. One of the effects of running this experiment on Chrome is a full-screen mode.

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While the full-screen mode seems to be a fun addition to Chrome Beta, it isn’t completely devoid of glitches. After activating the full-screen mode, on restarting the browser, Chrome Beta sometimes sticks to the full-screen mode, but on some instances returns back to normal. The good news is that unlike experiments of this magnitude, the full-screen mode does not get the browser to crash or restart by itself.

While Google has kept quiet about this ‘bug’, users are eagerly waiting for this mode to come to the more stable version of Chrome.

The Chrome Beta channel was released for phones and tablets running Android 4.0 or later earlier this month. This was touted to be a significant release for Google as it was a step in trying to bring Chrome for Android in line with the desktop version of the browser.

In a blog post, Google announced that the beta channel for phones and tablets had now joined its beta versions of Chrome for Mac, Windows, Linux and Chrome OS.  Google had warned that bugs were to be expected in the version, since that is the point of the beta release. The up side to a rough, slightly sluggish app is that users are now able to preview and try out the latest features on the Chrome app.

You can download the beta version of the Google Chrome browser from the Play Store. The great bit about this beta version is that it can run side-by-side with the stable Chrome release and you need not replace your existing Chrome app.