How To Increase the Size of Address Bar and Tabs Bar in Google Chrome on Ubuntu 18.10?

In this tutorial, we will be discussing how to increase the size of the address bar and tabs bar in Google Chrome on Ubuntu 18.10. This can be particularly useful if you’re using a high-resolution screen and find the default size of these elements to be too small.

Installing Gnome Tweaks

The first step is to install Gnome Tweaks, a tool that allows you to customize your Ubuntu desktop. To install Gnome Tweaks, open a terminal window and enter the following command:

sudo apt install gnome-tweaks

In this command, sudo is used to run the command with root privileges, apt is the package handling utility in Ubuntu, install is the command to install a new package, and gnome-tweaks is the name of the package we want to install.

Adjusting the Scaling Factor

Once Gnome Tweaks is installed, open it and navigate to the “Fonts” tab. Here, you will find an option to adjust the scaling factor. This will increase the size of the fonts and other elements in Chrome. However, please note that this will affect the entire desktop, not just Chrome.

Increasing the Size of Chrome Bars and Icons

If you only want to increase the size of the Chrome bars and icons without scaling all applications, you can use a workaround. However, please note that this method is considered a hack and may not provide precise results.

1. Open Google Chrome and go to the Chrome developer tools by right-clicking on any element of a webpage and selecting “Inspect” or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+I.
2. In the developer tools, select an element of the page and note its width.
3. Open Gnome Tweaks and change the font scaling factor to 2.0.
4. Go back to the Chrome developer tools and select the same element. You will notice that its width has been reduced by half, effectively scaling the entire content of the browser.
5. This method will increase the size of the address bar, tabs bar, and other elements in Chrome by a factor of 2.0. However, it will also downgrade your 4K display to HD 1920×1080 for the entire desktop.

Adjusting the Font Size of the Shell Font

If you use a shell theme, you can also adjust the font size of the shell font for the top bar by editing the appropriate .CSS file for the theme. This will allow you to increase the size of the address bar and tabs bar in Chrome without affecting other applications.

However, please note that the address bar in Chrome may appear fixed and tiny for some reason, and fixing it may require digging into the source code. Unfortunately, there is no direct equivalent of the UserChrome.css file in Firefox for Google Chrome.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have discussed how to increase the size of the address bar and tabs bar in Google Chrome on Ubuntu 18.10. We hope you find this information helpful. If you have any questions or need further assistance, feel free to leave a comment below.