Where’s my Chrome status bar gone?
QI’ve been using Chrome for years. At some point in the past month I noticed that an information bar that usually displayed at the bottom of Chrome no longer appears. So, in the past if I moved the mouse pointer over a link, a bar would appear at the bottom to show the website address of the destination.
I found this very useful for avoiding clicking fake links. I’ve had a good look through Chrome’s Settings page but I can’t find anything to switch this bar back on. Am I going whacko? The feature still works in Edge, but I don’t like using that browser. George Ward
AYou’re not going whacko. Chrome does indeed have a status bar that appears when the mouse pointer is hovered over a link of any kind. In fact, so important is this feature considered by Google that there’s no way to actually disable it.
So why has it disappeared? Because of a long-standing bug that affects only a few systems. It’s also intermittent, so we're guessing it’s a tough one for Google’s software engineers to find and then squash.
The fix is to disable a feature that seems entirely unrelated. First, open Chrome’s menu (three dots, top right), then click Settings. Now scroll down and click Advanced. Next, scroll down further to find the System section, then switch the ‘Use hardware acceleration when available’ slider to the Off position. Finally, click the Relaunch button (see screenshot below left) that appears next to this switch.
Your status bar should now be back in action. You can now switch this same slider back to On, which might improve performance a bit – but it’s possible you’ll lose the status bar again at some point.