Chrome OS needs a dark theme for its boot screen so my poor eyes don’t keep burning

As someone who owns several Chromebooks, I find myself turning them off and on many times per day. This could simply be because I’m tinkering so much with Chrome OS Canary, and it requires restarts for a bunch of things, but still – the device’s boot screen is something I encounter often, and it’s blindingly white. It’s not so bad during the day, but my gosh is it extremely painful and sudden during the evening or night!

I was thinking about how Google could fix this, and I came up with a simple solution (and an obvious one) – it should just add a dark theme to the boot screen. I mean, why not, right? Dark theme is appearing all across the OS and is even a part of the Recovery Screen now. I’m really not sure what the logic was behind adding a dark screen to something you see so few times in the life span of your use of a device, but whatever.

Anyways, if a user toggles dark or light theme on their Chromebook or Chromebox via the quick settings menu, then the same theme should be applied to their boot screen the next time they restart their device. Over on the Chromium Gerrit Google is, in fact, working on this, with the latest comment being made on it just this week, but it’s not primed for release any time soon.

boot-splash: allow customization of settings

BUG=none
TEST=tbd

Change-Id: Iea2798b82e3ed4ae1f054cfffeb3e0901db71097

One argument states that providing an option for changing the splash screen on a Chrome OS device isn’t necessarily the best case. Instead, the company should first try to improve how the OS works by default, and I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I recommend they tie it to the dark theme of the Chromebook. Another option would be to dynamically change the boot screen splash color based on the time of day and night or just based on the schedule of the night light feature.

i share our users’ hatred of our bright-white splash screen and would love to use a different color on all of my devices. i feel like there should be more arguing with UX to improve the default behavior before checking in a hidden setting for this, though (and it would feel ridiculous to me to expose a real user-facing setting for this).

obligatory link: http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2018/07/options.html

Dan Erat, Chromium Gerrit

At the end of the day, I’m just sick of sitting in a dark room, rebooting my Chromebook (or having it crash in Canary), and being torched in the face with the power of a thousand white, hot burning suns. I’m sure that everyone reading this can relate – especially if your Chromebook just had dim brightness, dark theme, and nightlight all on in combination with one another before the reboot. Let me know in the comments if you’re rooting for this feature to come to every device!

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash