Phones grow big and their top edges inch closer and closer toward the horizon. Over time, iOS and apps moved some of the important surfaces to the bottom (for better or worse – I still struggle with seeing results and completions appearing above inputs), and the well-designed Reachability gesture helps, too.

Still, the iOS web browser called Quiche Browser chose to tackle the problem, not the symptoms. It offers “Comfort Mode,” where you can ask it to move down the top edge of a bunch of surfaces closer to your fingers:

On top of that, true to the spirit of the app which revels in power-user customization, Quiche Browser allows you to decide precisely where the top should go in order to accommodate different people’s hands, and it even offers to do so per surface:

These are the affected surfaces with the option off and on:

The author, Greg de J., expanded on that on Threads:

While designing Comfort Mode in Quiche Browser, a tricky problem I had to be thoughtful about:

When you hold your phone in your right hand, favorite icons in the top left are harder to reach than ones on the right.

Search suggestions don’t have this problem, since they span the width of the screen.

That’s why favorites need to sit slightly lower than search suggestions, and why Comfort Mode lets you position both independently, so they all stay easy to reach one-handed.

It’s an interesting idea and I wonder if it’s seeing a lot of use.

The only design thought I had was: could the top space be filled or stylized so that this looks more intentional, rather than a potential rendering bug? Reachability does a good job of making it feel physical and adding a little arrow:

Then again, given my job, my brain might be perfectly primed to see rendering errors everywhere.