Chrome OS May Finally Be Getting a Dark Mode

New submitter andreavenezia shares a report from The Verge: Chrome OS may finally be getting a dark mode, but so far it's only been spotted in its experimental Canary channel, Android Central reported. Before you go tinkering with Canary just be advised: Canary is Google's "bleeding edge" Chrome OS path, which receives daily updates of features before they've been widely tested. It can only be accessed from Chromebooks switched into a special developer mode (not to be confused with the Chrome OS Developer channel). Google warns that Canary can be "unstable."

But at the moment, to activate dark mode on your Chromebook, you need to have the Canary channel installed. Once you've done that, Android Central says you just open Chrome and type in chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark and chrome://flags/#enable-webui-dark-mode into the URL bar. I should note I tried this on my older Chromebook and wasn't able to get it to work. But here's the view Android Police captured. Android Central says the dark mode has some bugs, but notes it seems to apply across the UI, not just as darker backgrounds.

My life is complete now

[thesjaakspoiler]

How could we have lived so long with a dark mode?
Back in the days, all interfaces for COBOL were black and white (rather green and light greenish).
Then came Windows and Macintosh along with their devlish white UI, waisting billions of megawatts in energy lighting up all those white pixels.
And even with the dawn of the internet, even Google made almost the entire screen white.
It never felt good to me.

Old news

[technoviking1]

I've been watching the news for updates on Chrome OS dark mode and it's been available in this form for like, a year at least. I don't know why there are so many sites reporting on this as if it's new.

Re:

[iampiti]

It looks like many sites just copy news from other sites and one of the most copied ones just run this story

POKE 53280,0

[istartedi]

Congratulations. You just accomplished something every C-64 had right out of the box in 1982.

Now see if you can beat its boot-time.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Perhaps a more useful metric would be time from power on to the browser being ready.

On a C64 it will depend if you are loading from tape or disk but either way a Chromebook will have it beat.

Re:

[istartedi]

You forgot about ROM cartridges.

Where the Chromebook has it beat is multi-tasking, since you could only use one ROM at a time.

How about supporting older Chromebooks?

[kriston]

How about supporting Chromebooks that are maybe five years old and perfectly fine? No?

Well, your Chromebook commercials [youtube.com] demonstrate that you don't care about the environment or longevity of laptops.

I guess the joke's on me. I have a half-dozen abandoned x86 Chromebooks that work perfectly fine with Neverware Cloudready [neverware.com]. Too bad I can't update my abandoned ARM Chromebooks, though.

Code named "palpantine"

[goombah99]

use the Dark mode luke.

blue light filter?

[yes-but-no]

Is dark-mode just about saving few milli/watts? [ie black bg instead white]; what we want is blue light filter (like flu.x) to help solve late sleep/ sleep deprivation. With giga watts of solar who cares abt few watts - our health is more important (atleast for some)

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Is dark-mode just about saving few milli/watts? [ie black bg instead white]; what we want is blue light filter (like flu.x) to help solve late sleep/ sleep deprivation. With giga watts of solar who cares abt few watts - our health is more important (atleast for some)

No, it's more about personal preference.

If you have a device with an OLED screen, yes, a dark screen will save significant amounts of power over a white screen - after all, OLEDs emit light, and dark panels don't emit light. But if it's an LCD s

Re:

[dak664]

As one develops cloudy lenses (common after 60yo) one sees halos around bright points. These halos overlap and reduce the apparent contrast of the dark areas.
I use the "Dark background and light text" plugin for Firefox. Much more comfortable for reading text. I hardly notice the dark halos!

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

I find white text on a black background easier to read. Ideal setting is pure black background and light grey text. Plenty of contrast but not too much.

At work I usually turn the monitor brightness right down and then adjust the blue channel down too.

Keep dark theme tradition

[MrBoring]

Let's keep with the tradition of hiding useful menu options under a tiny set of three lines, removing all visible menus and title bars. Of course, the dark theme will be the default because absolutely everyone loves it. Further, in keeping with Linux UI tradition, it will only be partially disableable without massive effort.

WinAmp used to be great at this. They used to take a whole OS's tested UI approach and say shove it, I'm redoing everything.

Re:

[iampiti]

Sadly, techies aren't impervious to fashions. So when (with good judgement) the UI for mobile devices with small screens got designed around minimizing wasting of screen real estate, some idiot thought it a good idea to generalize it to every kind of device. That's how we got the "hamburguer" menu and other assorted mobile-originated things on PC applications. And so PC UIs got much less usable.
That also gave us some other "great" things like huge buttons and blank spaces between clickable UI elements that