We’ve noticed that the dark mode has arrived to the Chrome Beta app on Android, following its arrival to Chrome Canary earlier this month. This, of course, brings that feature closer to the stable version of Chrome on Android, even though there are still some issue that Google needs to fix before that happens.
Please note that the feature is not available in Settings of the Chrome Beta application, at least not right away, you will need to manually activate it through developer settings. Developer settings in Chrome are called “flags”, and we’ll guide you through the activation of Chrome’s dark mode one step at a time.
Once you download and install Chrome Beta from the Play Store (if you haven’t already), open up the app, and in the search bar type in the following: “chrome://flags”. Once the flags menu opens, simply type in “dark” in its search bar and you will notice two separate options that you need to activate, “Android web contents dark mode” and “Android Chrome UI dark mode”. Both of those options will be set to “Default”, but you need to tap that options on both in order to access the drop-down menu, and select “Enabled” in both cases.
Once you do all that, Chrome Beta will offer you to reload the app, accept. Once you do that, launch the overview / multitasking menu, and swipe away Chrome Beta card, just to be sure. This step won’t be necessary in many cases, but sometimes the app doesn’t want to accept changes from the flags menu if you don’t kill the app manually, despite restarting it.
After you launch the app once again, hit the three dots in the top-right or top-left corner (depending on how your app is set up), and then choose “Settings”. In that menu, you will be able to find the “Dark mode” option, tap that and flip the switch in the menu that opens. Making changes in flags will activate dark mode only half way, this option in settings will push it that extra mile.
Now, before you do all this, please note that the feature is still not stable, which is why it’s available via the beta app, not the stable one. In some instances, you won’t be able to see text on websites as it will be dark-colored, just like the background Chrome’s dark mode uses. In other cases colors on images will be inverted, so white images will be black, and so forth. The bottom line is, the feature is not entirely stable yet, but it is more than usable. It was quite usable in Chrome Canary, and it is even further along now.
Considering that the feature has arrived in Chrome Beta, Google may push it to the stable version in the near future, at least via the flags menu, as we’re not that sure that it will be available via regular settings that soon, considering how many issues the company still needs to fix. In any case, it’s nice to see that the company is working on the dark mode for Chrome, finally, and it’s also nice that the content on websites is affected by these changes, not just the app’s UI (like in Opera, for example), as it makes it far more useful.