How you can enable Material You for Chromebook Quick Settings menu right now

There’s been a fair amount of hype for the new Material You UI elements Google is bringing to ChromeOS. One of the most Google-y of the changes is the overhauled Quick Settings menu that has been in the works for quite some time at this point. The earliest we laid eyes on it was back in November of 2022, but work on this effort has been going on long before that time.

As these things tend to do, the feature has worked its way all the way down to the Stable Channel of ChromeOS 111, though it isn’t available without a feature flag at this point. And that’s probably for the best. Even though you can easily enable this new-look UI piece of ChromeOS, there are some bugs I’m currently seeing that might turn some of you off using it for now.

How to enable ChromeOS Material You Quick Settings

Before we talk about the stuff that isn’t working, however, let me show you how to quickly enable it and see it for yourself. First up, as I said above, you’ll need to be sure you are running ChromeOS 111. From what we can see over at cros.tech, it seems only a couple modern devices are still on ChromeOS 110, so most of you should be in the clear. Still, a quick check at Settings > About ChromeOS will let you know for sure. If you aren’t yet updated, hit that Check for updates button and you should be up to speed quickly.

After that, you next need to open a Chrome browser window and enter chrome://flags/qs-revamp into the URL bar. This should take you to a flag that can be set to Enabled, followed by a quick restart of the UI that can be done with the blue Restart button that appears at the bottom.

After the restart, you should now see a revamped Quick Settings panel when you click on the clock, Wi-Fi or Battery icon in your tray. If you’ve seen what Android looks like these days on a Pixel phone, you know the vibe Google is going for, here, and it works quite nicely on ChromeOS. Not only do you get the updated settings tiles, the thicker sliders look great and are designed to match up with your background and provide a nice complementary color to your settings area.

Things that aren’t quite working

But there are some things that aren’t fully functional. This feature is behind a flag, after all, so some of this is expected. First up, since we just talked about it, the custom colors that match your theme don’t quite work right now. It works in other ChromeOS channels (Beta, Dev and Canary), so that feature is definitely coming: it just isn’t here yet.

Then there are some things that just don’t work. The quick switch for Dark/Light mode is gone, the arrow at the end of the brightness slider doesn’t go anywhere (I’d assume it would go to settings, the theme selector, or something similar), and the small Night Light button isn’t actually turning anything on, either.

You can obviously still affect these settings from the main settings menu, but some of you might not like losing quick access to them on your device. If that sounds like you, I’d just wait for the new Material You Quick Settings to officially roll out. For those of you that are OK with a hiccup here and there to see the direction Google is headed with ChromeOS design, I’d recommend turning this on to check it out. It’s a cool look to a portion of the OS you visit pretty often, and the change in scenery is a breath of fresh air.