Chrome OS is finally getting the Night Light feature that has long helped owners of other devices to get better sleep by reducing the amount of blue light put out by their devices. In Chrome OS, the feature makes changes to font rendering, screen colors, and image rendering to make content on the screen as eye-friendly as possible for late-night users. The feature also comes with some basic controls, allowing users to edit how warm or cool the color temperature is, and choose whether the mode can only be triggered manually, will happen automatically when the sun sets in their area or set custom hours for Night Light mode.
The new feature is still in testing and may have some changes on board or additional controls by the time it hits the Stable channel. Those who want to give it a try will have to be willing to give up the stability of the Stable and Beta channels; the feature is currently only available in the Canary build of Chrome OS. While it seems ready for primetime and looks to do what it’s supposed to do, there is still no word on when the feature may be making its way to the Dev, Beta and Stable channels. The latest Chrome Dev for Linux did not pack this feature as of this writing, nor did Chrome Canary for Windows. This means that the feature is likely only going to be available in Chrome OS, and not in the browser; this makes sense, since it tinges everything on the screen, including system menus, to reduce blue light.
Chrome OS has seen a Night Mode feature added on in the past, but that only tweaked the onscreen colors, rather than actively filtering blue light. Additionally, this new Night Light mode boasts a far larger set of controls than the previously seen Night Mode feature. The feature is only available in the Chrome OS Canary channel for now, and will likely not be coming to other platforms. On Mac, Linux, and Windows, rolling out Night Light would likely require deeper system integration, and such a feature is already built into most modern Android devices.