Description:

Brave for iOS v1.61 has featured an updated design for the browser toolbar, as shown in the figma in #8379 from brave-ios.

While there are no visual bugs, some users may find the experience crippled compared to the previous design, especially if they turn on Display Zoom. In particular, the URL bar obstructs more screen real estate, and the paddings between icons can appear uncomfortably wide, in a way such that some users miss the previous design.

In other words...

I own an iPhone 13 mini. I turn on Display Zoom. It looks bad.

Not only it's no longer compact over Safari (one major preference when choosing Brave), I can barely read the URL in almost every case (See screenshots). It's possible that the redesign was hardly (or never?) tested with configurations like mine.

Proposed solution

On the desktop counterpart, the flag #brave-horizontal-tabs-update can be toggled to switch between old and new designs, but were not available for the iOS app (not listed in brave://flags accessed in v1.64 beta build, see #37149). Given this, I don't see why a similar flag that reverts to a previous design cannot be implemented in iOS as well.

Device details:

iPhone 13 mini (iOS 17.4)

Steps to Reproduce

1. Go to iOS Settings > Display & Brightness > Display Zoom, set to Larger Text
2. Open Brave and browse any webpage

Expected result:

At least the web address should be legible.

Actual result:

It does not.

Before v1.61	After v1.61