Chrome OS developers have been killing it as of late with more updates and additions than you can shake a stick at. Yesterday alone, we reported on the rapidly developing “Crostini Project” that will bring a new Linux UI to Chrome OS in a way we’ve never seen before.
Throw in the upcoming changes to the wallpaper picker and the official announcement of the marriage of Qualcomm and Chrome OS and it’s shaping up to be a landmark week in Chromebook land.
And it’s only Tuesday!!!
Today, we get another glimpse at some system UI tweaks developers have been working on and personally, I’m excited to see this one move to Stable ASAP. The official title is “system-tray-unified
” but I’m going to call it what it is:
DARK MODE
The change is a simple one but I love it. I use dark mode for everything. My IDE, reader apps, YouTube you name it. If it has a dark mode, I use it.
To check out the new unified system tray you’ll need to be in the Canary channel. I don’t recommend it but if you choose to do so, please make sure you know what you’re doing and back up all of your local data.
To enable the setting, head to chrome://flags
and search “new system menu.” The “dark mode” will only affect the system tray. I really hope, in the future, developers will add some of these new stylings to the main system page and other Chrome OS settings.
I like it!
*Update*
Mariomenti noted in the comments that this feature was available in the Developer channel. I checked this morning on the Acer 15 and didn’t see it but after a second look, I realized the flag is different in the Dev channel. If you are in Developer channel you can access the flag buy searching “new system menu” and the flag should be labeled #enable-ash-new-system
.
Thanks for the heads up Mario!!!