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Google is continuing to make progress on dark mode for the web content and you will soon be able to enjoy this feature on desktop Chrome and Chrome OS alike. Google has been working hard to improve dark mode on the web and have started to roll out some of these massive changes via Chrome for Android, where you can currently enable flags to turn on dark mode. As reported by 9to5Google, this feature is soon to be “cross-platform” and is coming to Chrome OS, Mac, Windows, and Linux, in addition to Android. Sorry iPhone users, we are not seeing any mention of iOS at this point.
This is no easy task because web content is not predictable, as explained by Robby when this updated and improved version of dark mode for web content first began appearing for Chrome 77 on Android. Dark mode for web content is unlike dark mode for an app or program that has mostly static content and a predictable layout; the web is unpredictable.
This improved dark mode Google is working on is not just about inverting colors, it goes beyond that to now offer five different modes that allow Chrome to dynamically decide what would look best for the content on the page. This allows the browser to automatically display the content in the best way possible for the user without just applying a blanket, single color inversion to the page. The five modes are a bit technical and you don’t really need to know exactly what each does on a specific level, just that they each provide a different way of rendering content in the new, dark theme.
Right now, we are not seeing anything in the commit that points to dark mode for the entire system UI on Chrome OS, but since things like menus and settings are static, we fully expect to see it in the future. After all, with Chrome OS, the majority of what you see is web-based content, so once dark mode for web content is all sorted, the devs will simply need to apply a dark theme to the notifications and overflow menus to make the dark mode transition complete.
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