Google’s Material Design is slowly making its way into all of the company’s products as a unified design standard, and Chrome OS is no exception, with a recent batch of updates in the Developer Channel bringing the definitive style laid out by Matias Duarte to a few more facets of the operating system. While many of these updated elements are only available by turning on experimental flags and still have some issues, everything that works does so smoothly, and the changes are sweeping and cohesive. This means that the updates are likely coming to the stable channel in the near future.
The latest spurt of Material Design primarily affects the Extensions and Chrome Apps pages, which pick up not only the Material Design side menu but also the card design featured in apps like Google Now and Google Play. Both of these also come with toggle boxes which enable and disable extensions. The History screen also gets a makeover that makes it rather similar to the Extensions and Apps pages. This section was also updated with a side menu and each day of one’s Internet history seemingly got its own card, complete with animated Material Design checkboxes that can be used to delete items. The Bookmarks page got the same treatment, but with a single card for all bookmarks, and no checkboxes in sight. Finally, the bug reporting page gets a rather simple Material Design makeover that turned it into a simple form with animated checkboxes.
These Material Design updates come in the midst of a massive rollout of Android and Play Store compatibility for Chrome OS devices, which make them not only an update to help bring Chrome OS in line with Google’s design vision, but a glimpse into what a more consolidated future may look like, with Android and Chrome OS seemingly folded into one another and sporting a similar UI. While the similarities aren’t as dramatic as those that a Windows phone and PC share, Google is making it quite clear that Material Design is not just about a unified design standard for developers, but also a unified experience for users.
