Google is starting to see the light (darkness?) in offering users a dark mode option for some of its products and services, such as Android and YouTube. Some people find dark themes to simply be less straining on the eyes. If you’re one of them and you own a Windows 10 PC, we have good news—a dark mode option is being added to Google’s Chrome browser.
Confirmation of this comes from Chrome developer Peter Kasting, who in May of last year submitted a bug report related to having a dark mode.
“Windows 10 allows users to set their apps to ‘light’ or ‘dark’ mode. Chrome should respect this. The most obvious hack is to use the default incognito color scheme in normal mode (as well as incognito) if the system is in dark mode. Long term, we should perhaps have a better answer. This has been a popular external request for some time,” Kasting wrote at the time.
Fast forward to now and Kasting confirmed in a Reddit thread that “native dark mode is in progress” on the desktop. He doesn’t know if the same is true on mobile, as Google employs different teams for its desktop and mobile Chrome builds, but a native dark theme is in fact headed for Windows 10.
This is a smart move for Google, especially since it already announced plans to bring a dark mode option in Chrome for macOS Mojave. That’s expected to be available in early 2019, perhaps with the Chrome 73 release. As for enabling dark mode in Chrome on Windows 10 PCs, no timeline has been shared.
