In a recent update, Chrome on Android introduced a change that caused the previously experimental ‘duet’ feature to be enabled by default. This places an additional toolbar at the bottom of the screen with buttons for new tab, search, and share. This bar is supposed to disappear at the same time when the top toolbar disappears (typically when scrolling down), but on my phone this was often not the case, especially on pages that are not long enough to allow scrolling. Worse, the bottom part of such pages could then become permanently obscured by the toolbar, pretty damn annoying.
It does make sense to place controls at the bottom because this makes them usable with one's thumbs, but then everything should be put at the bottom, not both at the top and bottom! Because the latter is currently impossible in Chrome however (as far as I know), the best you can do to avoid the possible nuisances of this bottom toolbar, is to disable it.
This used to be controlled by a single setting called “Chrome Duet” in the chrome flags. Now however, there seems to be a new one called “Duet TabStrip Integration” that also enables this feature. It is unclear how these interact.
To completely disable the bar, enter “chrome://flags” in the address bar, and then enter “Duet” in the Search flags box. Set both “Chrome Duet” and “Duet TabStrip Integration” to “Disabled”. Then restart Chrome. If the bar is still present, toggle the flags back to “Enabled” and then “Disabled,” and restart Chrome yet again. Keep repeating this dance and eventually it will work.
I'm inclined to try another browser but unfortunately Google managed to lock me into their ecosystem because I use Chrome on other devices and it is pretty handy to have everything synchronised, like bookmarks. If they keep annoying me with unexpected changes like these however, I may just become motivated enough to migrate all devices to another browser.
