Material You should still be coming to ChromeOS, even if it is a little way off

Over the years and since the Peeking Launcher and subsequently, the Productivity Launcher have, well, launched, ChromeOS has factored in a slight tinge of the user’s wallpaper into the UI color. It’s subtle and easy to miss, but it’s given us a hint at where Google wants to take the visual design of its operating system.

I’ve already created a mock-up of what ChromeOS would look like if the company applied a Material You redesign to the entire thing, and since then, several things have occurred. We’ve received a calendar widget, a notification rework, and the new launcher – all as I predicted with my mock-up!

Now, the full-fledged Material You redesign is on its way. Internally, Google is calling it “Material Next”, and has for some time, and even hinted at its release on Chromebooks during Google I/O a few years ago. Unfortunately, we still haven’t seen much of anything in the way of the true redesign, and its efforts up until this point have been focused on redesigning the functionality and systems to pave the way for it.

A new Chromium commit discovered initially by 9to5Google shows that Google is still making this happen. The commit has since been abandoned but is likely to be reinstated or recreated shows that Material Next for ChromeOS should be coming in the near future as a developer flag starting on the Canary channel.

ChromeOS Material Next MVP

When enabled, runs ChromeOS in Material Next MVP mode.

#cros-next-mvp

When enabled, one should be able to dynamically change the UI color across the operating system by simply changing their wallpaper, and this change should be a lot more noticeable and vibrant than the current color iteration.

I’m not sure whether this will provide any additional styling to bring ChromeOS more in line with Android 13, but the design we currently have is very reminiscent of it already. The dark grey or white colors with rounded corners and plenty of padding were intentionally lifted from the mobile operating system, so really, the coloring is one of the only things left to implement.

Material Next ought to provide that, at least as a beginning step to the future polish of ChromeOS, and I’m extremely excited to finally see this come to life sometime later this year. If it rears its head on Canary as a flag for any of us here we’ll be sure to enable it and show it off to get you excited as well!