Chrome in One UI 8 DeX may soon offer better browsing experience

In 2017, Samsung started offering high-end Galaxy smartphones with DeX, a feature that, when you connect these phones to an external monitor, offers a desktop-like interface, letting you control it with a keyboard and mouse. This wasn’t a feature that Android offered, but something that Samsung added on top. Fast forward to 2025, Google added a similar feature to Android (with Android 16), called the Desktop Mode. 

As a feature built into an OS gets support from a wider range of apps compared to one added by a third-party as a customisation, Samsung adopted it, and with One UI 8.0, started offering DeX based on Android’s Desktop Mode. Well, Samsung’s adoption of Android 16’s Desktop Mode for DeX will soon start paying off, as Google is upgrading Chrome for Android to work better with the Desktop Mode.

When you connect an Android phone to an external monitor, start using the Desktop Mode, and open the Google Chrome app, it will offer a layout similar to the one that it offers on macOS and Windows. Now, when you start browsing the web, some websites may recognise that you are browsing on a large, horizontally-oriented screen, and adjust the layout to offer a desktop-like experience. 

However, many other websites will show you a layout optimised for small, vertically-oriented screens. Why? The answer is the user agent, a string of code that the browser sends to a website to tell what kind of device it is. Chrome for Android recognises the device as a phone, and that’s what it tells the website. As such, the website shows you a layout optimised for small, vertically-oriented screens.

You can tap on the three-dot icon at the top-right corner of the app and select the ‘Desktop Site' option to make the website offer a desktop layout. However, performing this additional step for every website you browse spoils the user experience of the Desktop Mode. Well, that’s exactly the problem Google is working on solving.

According to Android Authority, Google has added a feature to Chrome for Android, which, when you connect the phone to an external monitor and start using the Desktop Mode, makes the app tell websites that it is a desktop. With that, the website shows a layout optimised for desktops, or large, horizontally-oriented screens.

The publication says that the feature isn’t enabled by default, and it had to do so manually. However, with an update to Chrome in the future, Google may enable the feature and make it available for everyone. With that, when you connect your Galaxy phone with One UI 8 to an external monitor and use DeX, Chrome will load desktop versions of websites.