Dark mode has finally arrived to Chrome, and this time around we’re talking about the stable version of the app. Dark mode had managed to find its way to both Chrome Canary and Chrome Beta in the past, and if you’ve been waiting for it to arrive to Chrome stable, well, you’re in luck.
Do keep in mind that dark mode is still not available in Chrome’s settings, you still have to enable it via Chrome flags, which are essentially advanced options for Chrome, or developer settings, depending on who you ask. Chrome flags contain various additional settings for the app, and a number of test features.
Accessing Chrome flags is really easy, though before we do, keep in mind that even though Chrome’s dark mode works great, it’s still not perfect. Some images will be inverted in terms of colors (depending on the website), and you may also encounter text fields where the text will be white on a white background. So, if either of those issues will end up bothering you, we recommend you to stay away from the dark mode until it arrives to regular settings within Chrome, in other words, until Google makes it as stable as possible.
With that in mind, if you’d like to enable the option anyway, we’ll let you know how you can do that. First of all, fire up the app, then, in the search bar, type the following: “chrome://flags”. Once the “flags” menu opens, you will need to type in the word “dark” in its search field. At that point, you will see two options that you can activate, “Android web contents dark mode” and “Android Chrome UI dark mode”. The first one will make every website dark(er), including its content, while the second one will only make Chrome’s UI dark.
If you’d like to avoid issues that we’ve mentioned earlier, enabling dark mode for UI only may be a good idea, as it will not affect the content, but the content will still be regular in terms of colors. In any case, it’s your call. Let’s presume that you want to enable both options, though, all you need to do is hit the word “Default” in order for both options, which will launch a drop-down menu, and from it, you need to select the “Enabled” option.
Once that is done, you will be asked to relaunch Chrome, do that, and after you do, activate your multitasking / overview menu, and swipe away the Chrome card. This is usually not a necessary step, but in some cases, it’s necessary for the next step. Once you do that, and fire up Chrome again, navigate to Chrome’s settings by hitting the three dots in the top-right or bottom-right corner, depending on where your Chrome navigation bar is. The moment you enter “Settings”, you will notice the “Dark Mode” option, hit that, and flip the switch.
That is pretty much it, at this point, Chrome’s dark mode will be activated for both Chrome’s UI, and content that the app ends up loading, on pretty much every website. Dark mode works far better now that it did in Chrome Canary and Chrome Beta, but as already mentioned, there are still some issues with the loaded content, so keep that in mind.