by Martin Brinkmann on January 04, 2019 in Google Chrome – 4 comments
Google is working on integrating Dark Mode into the Google Chrome web browser on Windows. Google engineers started work on a dark theme for Chrome in 2018 and enabled it for Chrome on Mac OS X 10.14 and higher as a way for Mac users to use the system’s Dark Mode feature in the browser.
It took Google a bit longer to integrate dark mode functionality in Chrome for the Windows operating system. The still-ongoing project is currently available as a preview for Chrome Canary only; Google plans to launch dark mode for Windows eventually.
Google Chrome will support the dark mode on all supported versions of Windows and not just Windows 10. Windows 10 has a dark mode feature that is very similar to that of Apple’s Mac operating system.
Users may enable the system-wide setting and many native, e.g. File Explorer, and some third-party applications such as Mozilla Firefox will abide by it.
Chrome’s implementation will work that way on Windows 10 as well; it is unclear how it will work on older versions of the Windows operating system. One solution could be to implement a preference toggle or integrate dark mode as a theme that users can select.
Dark Mode is only available in Chrome Canary at the time of writing. Users may enable it by launching the Chrome web browser with a startup flag.
The interface looks like this when done.
Note that the implementation is not complete at the time of writing. The menu, for instance, uses black text on a dark background, and that makes text barely decipherable. The same is true for the right-click context menu. Many internal pages, e.g. chrome://extensions/, are not painted in darker colors either at this point in development.
Chrome Canary needs to be launched with the –force-dark-mode parameter. Right-click on the Chrome icon on the Windows taskbar and select Properties from the context menu (on some systems, you need to right-click again on Chrome Canary in that first menu, and then on Properties).
Add –force-dark-mode to the end of the Target field and make sure that there is a space between the command and the path, e.g. “C:UsersMartinAppDataLocalGoogleChrome SxSApplicationchrome.exe” –force-dark-mode.
Restart Chrome and it should launch with the dark theme enabled. Remove the parameter again to restore the light theme.
Interested users may follow development on the official Chromium Bugs website.
Now You: Do you prefer light or dark themes? (via Deskmodder and 9to5Google)