Google Is Developing A Native Dark Mode For Chrome With Limited Initial Rollout
A good dark theme for your computer and other devices is worth its weight in gold to many users. Google is looking to add a little dark magic to Chrome, and its initial rollout will be very limited. Google Chrome users can already download third-party dark themes for the browser right now, but Chrome is getting a native dark mode with a caveat.
That caveat is that the native dark mode will work on macOS only. There is speculation that the native dark mode might come to other Chrome users later, but that is unconfirmed for now. Apple will begin supporting a system-wide dark mode with macOS 10.14 Mojave, which is currently in beta and will be released this fall.
Support for the dark theme was spied in a recent comment for Chrome on macOS that reads "add command line switch to force dark mode." A discussion on the topic over on the linked bug report sees a developer with the handle "lgrey@chromium.org" talking about implementing support for macOS dark mode and noting that it's not going to be ready in time for the M70 release but stating "we should try to get it in for M71." The M70 release landed in stable beta this month and brought support for Android and Mac fingerprint scanners.
Stable Chrome 71 is expected to land on December 4th. Chrome developers will certainly have to work on the dark mode and figure out a way for people using it, once implemented, to tell the difference between it and incognito mode. Perhaps if the dark mode proves popular, devs could roll it out to all versions of Chrome on all operating systems, including Windows and Linux.
