Google finally caught on to the fact that not everyone appreciates the white-heavy design of their Material Theme design especially now that people are looking at dark mode to manage their batteries and their eyes. They’ve been releasing dark themes for several of their apps and pretty soon, the Chrome browser will also be getting it. But it looks like it won’t be just the UI elements that will be darkened here but the web pages themselves, which may be good news or bad news, depending on your preference.
Chromium’s Gerrit showed a code change that indicates that the dark theme that Chrome will implement isn’t just for the UI elements of the browser. In a future update, if a user will enable the dark theme on the Chrome browser, even the web pages themselves will be recolored to a darker color scheme. The commit adds enables the browser to use its built-in high contrast settings, which are already being used for accessibility purposes anyway so it shouldn’t make that much of a difference in terms of performance.
When the commit was merged, we saw what it would supposedly look like, although it’s still a work in progress. It looks like it’s just inverting the most of the content, including fonts and images. But hopefully as they continue to work on it, they will be able to improve this dark theme so that it will be a big help for those trying to have a less conspicuous browser when in a low light or dark place.
Of course we have no idea yet as to when these changes will roll out, first on the beta version and then as a stable update. We might see a system-wide dark theme as well with the Android Q. We’ll find out more probably during the Google I/O Developer’s Conference happening in May.
