Opening a webpage in the middle of the night is certainly not the best experience. Your retinas are overwhelmed by the huge burst of photons and the iris can only contract so much. Web browsing on mobile or should I say Chrome is standard for most of us and I thoroughly miss the dark mode on the mobile browser. I had decided to switch but Chrome decided to drop an easter egg with their latest Chrome Update(74) which made me stay. You can now use Chrome Flags to turn the entire Chrome dark and yes I mean entire browser, app UI, websites, and everything. Let’s dive right in.
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Android Chrome Browser Supports Dark Theme
The very first thing we need to do is to update your web browser. Go to the Play Store and update the app. Just to be sure we’ll check if you’re on the latest Chrome(74) version.
Go to Settings in the Chrome app and scroll all the way to the bottom and tap About Chrome. It should Read Chrome 74.0.something. If you don’t see this then I have some bad news for you. You would have to wait for the update for your device. You can continue once you get to Chrome 74 and above.
Open your freshly updated chrome, accept all the settings and log in with your account to sync your history. Type ‘chrome://flags‘ in the search bar and hit go on your keyboard.
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It will load up a screen that reads ‘Experiments’ with a red warning. We are going to ignore the warning because it’s mostly harmless but can sometimes leave your browser useless but that rarely happens, trust me.
Tap the Search bar on the top of the page and type ‘dark’ and hit go. It should show two search results.
We have to enable both Flags but follow a sequence. If not done in the correct order then you would still get Dark websites but won’t get an option to turn on Dark mode for the entire app. So we’ll first Enable ‘Android Chrome UI dark mode‘. Tap the button that says ‘default’ under it and select ‘Enabled’ from the list of options and Relaunch your browser by tapping the button on the bottom.
Now, we’ll enable the second Chrome Flag ‘Android web contents dark mode‘. Follow the same steps that we used for the previous Flag and save the changes. You’d have to Relaunch your browser.
Now, your browser is ready, to enable the app-wide dark mode, tap the options(⋮) button on the top right corner and select ‘Settings’ from the menu.
Scroll down and find Dark mode under Basics section. You can toggle the button on the page to instantaneously toggle between dark mode and light mode.
Just like I said before about that warning on the Flags page, you don’t have to worry about it. Well, there is a small bug in one of those flags. The UI flag works perfectly and you can switch easily but the web content flag is a little finicky. The web content is not just dark but the colors are also inverted. That would have been fine if it were limited to the texts but it inverts the images as well which results in some ugly formatting.
How to Get Dark mode on Google Chrome
This was a quick way to get the dark mode on Google Chrome. Other browsers have had this functionality for quite a while now. Samsung, Opera, Puffin are some of the few which incorporate the dark mode effectively in the android apps. I tested these flags a couple of times and I found the same error every time that if you mess up the sequence then the dark mode for UI doesn’t get activated. Maybe the future updates will solve this until then stick to these steps and enjoy the dark mode. Reach out if you face any problem while activating the dark mode on Google Chrome. Let us know in the comments below.
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