Android Chrome Browser Supports Dark Theme.
Opening a web page in the middle of the night certainly isn’t the best experience. Your retina is hit by a huge burst of photons, and the iris can only shrink so much. Browsing the web on mobile devices, or better said, Chrome is standard for most of us, and I am completely missing dark mode in a mobile browser. I decided to switch, but Chrome decided to ditch the easter egg with its latest Chrome update (74), which made me stay. You can now use Chrome flags to disable all of Chrome, and yes, I mean the entire browser, app UI, websites and everything else. Let’s get started.
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Android Chrome browser supports dark theme
The very first thing we need to do is update your web browser. Go to the Play Store and update the app. Just to be sure we check if you are using the latest version of Chrome (74).
In the Chrome app, go to Settings, scroll down and click About Chrome. It should read Chrome 74.0.something. If you don’t see it, I have bad news for you. You will have to wait for an update for your device. You can continue as soon as you go to Chrome 74 and up.
Open the recently updated Chrome, accept all settings and sign in to your account to sync history. Enter “chrome: // flags” in the search bar and press “Go” on your keyboard.
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This will open a screen labeled “Experiments” with a red warning. We will ignore this warning because it is mostly harmless, but it can sometimes render your browser useless, but this rarely happens, trust me.
Tap the search bar at the top of the page, type “dark” and click “Start.” It should show two search results.
We must enable both flags, but in a specific sequence. If you don’t do it in the correct order, you will still end up with dark sites, but you won’t be able to turn on dark mode for the entire app. Therefore, we will first enable “Android Chrome UI Dark Mode”. Click the button labeled “default” below it, select “Enabled” from the list of options and restart your browser by clicking the button below.
We will now enable the second Chrome checkbox “Android Web Content Dark Mode”. Follow the same steps we used for the previous flag and save your changes. You will have to restart your browser.
Your browser is now ready to enable dark mode for the entire application, click the options (⋮) button in the upper right corner and select “Settings†from the menu.
Scroll down and find Dark Mode under Basics. You can toggle the button on the page to instantly switch between dark and light modes.
As I said about this warning on the Flags page, you have nothing to worry about. Well, there is a small bug in one of these flags. The UI flag works great and you can switch easily, but the web content flag is a little finicky. Web content is not only dark, but also colors are inverted. It would be nice if it was limited to texts, but it also inverts images, resulting in some ugly formatting.
How to get dark mode on Google Chrome
This was a quick way to get dark mode in Google Chrome. Other browsers have had this feature for quite some time. Samsung, Opera, Puffin are some of the few that effectively incorporate dark mode into Android apps. I checked these flags a couple of times and every time I found the same error: if you break the sequence, dark mode for the UI is not activated. Perhaps future updates will fix this problem, but for now, stick to these steps and enjoy dark mode. Please contact if you have any problems activating dark mode in Google Chrome. Let us know in the comments below.
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