How to Enable Dark Mode on the Chrome Browser?.
Dark Mode isn’t going anywhere, and everyone, including Microsoft and Apple, is finally starting to take it seriously. The native dark theme on your computer makes your Chrome browser dark, but the websites remain intact. This is an inconvenience for me, and I would like to fix it, so in this article, we will try to set up dimming in the desktop Chrome browser, which would make all websites dark. Let’s start.
There are many ways to do this, but I will pick two of the most popular; using chrome flags and chrome extension. I’ll show you how to enable dark mode using both methods and compare them in functionality and customization.
Also read: How to enable dark mode in Android 10
Turn on dark mode with Chrome Flags
Open Google Chrome browser on your computer and make sure it is updated to the latest version. Enter “chrome: // flags” and press Enter.
It will download a list of all the experimental features that you can enable in your browser to add additional functionality to your browser. Click the search bar and enter “dark.”
It will show you a few different flags, select “force dark mode for web content” and select “enabled” from the dropdown menu.
Now, just restart your browser and all websites will be in high contrast mode.
Turn on dark mode with the Chrome extension
The extension does not include any experimental functionality in the browser, but manually inverts the color scheme and text of the web page by reading its content.
To use this, you need to first download and add the Dark Reader Chrome extension to your web browser. You can go to the Chrome Web Store and search for a Chrome extension, or simply click this link to install.
Once added to the browser, you can simply click the icon next to the address bar to open the options. You can turn it on or off, adjust the settings and set the dark mode for each site individually. Easy, right?
Which one should you choose?
The Chrome flag works surprisingly well considering it’s an experimental feature. It only works on sites with light backgrounds and inverts the colors (just like the invert option on your Android smartphone). For example, white background turns black and black text turns white. It detects if a website is dark and preserves these properties. However, it has a hard time recognizing padding and shadows, which can lead to unexpected smudges in places like the bottom of the YouTube player.
Overall, I can live with it because it doesn’t interfere with media like images and videos on a web page.
However, the Chrome extension is in a league of its own. You can customize almost every website on the entire world wide web and give it a dark theme and it really looks decent.
You can adjust the brightness, contrast, blue filter of a web page and adjust these settings for each website separately. As I said, Dark Reader can change any website, which means it will also change websites that are already dark, so the extension gives you the option to keep or change the original website layout. If that wasn’t enough, you can also change the font and typeface of the website text to your liking. However, Dark Reader also has its limitations: it does not work on some websites with an old layout, such as Paul Graham’s website.
If you want the simple solution not to appear in the Chrome browser, select the Chrome checkbox. However, if you want a consistent look and feel across all websites, then the Chrome extension is a great choice. Which would you choose? Let me know in the comments below.