Dark Mode Goes Live In Chrome Canary

Earlier reports had suggested that Google is working on dark mode for Chrome. References to the upcoming feature were spotted in early development builds of the browser and now it’s possible to enable dark mode for content and webpages in Chrome Canary. The mode is actually capable of tweaking a site’s design and displaying it in a darker tone.

The dark mode in Chrome can be enabled through a new feature flag, #enable-android-web-contents-dark-mode to be precise. It activates a force_dark_mode_enabled preference in the browser’s engine.

This is how Chrome goes beyond just displaying the menus and navigation bar in a darker color and continuing to render websites in their original colors. What this does is make the browser use a high contrast setting which changes the way some of the colors on a website are shown.

We’ve been seeing a lot of apps bring dark mode functionality for their users and this is nothing new for browsers as well. The Samsung Internet browser has had a dark mode since 2017 and don’t let the name fool you, the app can be used on non-Samsung devices as well.

The dark mode feature for Chrome is now live in the Canary build. It may still be a while before this feature is rolled out to the stable version of Google’s popular browser.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Chrome