Chrome gets even more colorful with its big redesigned Material You

Google announced Material You at this year’s I / O conference, and this post-Material Design chapter looks like arguably the company’s most ambitious move yet. Material You is all about embracing emotion and expression, using humanistic principles such as soft shapes and vibrant color themes that match your wallpaper. We’ve seen Google’s radical new design language spill over into its apps over the past few months – one of them is Chrome, which saw a sprinkling of color extraction when we covered it for the month. last. Now it looks like Google is getting into Chrome’s Material You makeover.

As recently discovered on Chromium Gerrit, Google has updated its dynamic color indicator on Chrome for Android to support full extraction of Material You colors. The browser will apply new tints throughout its user interface, which is unique to the wallpaper accent colors pulled by Android 12. If you are on the Canary channel, you will be able to preview the updated appearance by enabling two flags – copy and paste the following URLs (in bold) in the Chrome address bar:

Set the second flag to “On (full)”, then restart Chrome. Once it reopens you’ll have to reopen it a second time to see the changes – force it to close from the Recents screen and relaunch it from the launcher.

From left to right: Homepage; Chrome home page; Search for the Chrome home page.

From left to right: Homepage; Chrome home page; Search for the Chrome home page.

As stated above, Chrome will start grabbing the colors sampled by Android 12 and applying them in its user interface. The home page and tab grid now have a subtle tint applied to their backgrounds that varies depending on the wallpaper set on your phone. Most notably, Chrome’s address bar gets a pop of color, which complements the pale hue nicely. The tint is also visible when your device is in dark mode, which looks quite sleek compared to its boring old dark gray.

The lack of color applied to a few areas of Chrome (like the context menu) is a clear sign that the feature isn’t quite ready for the mainstream. But even in its current working state, it fits perfectly with the aesthetic of Android 12 – it even looks good too. Chrome is just one of many apps today to support Material You, and it’s becoming clear that Google takes applying its design theme seriously (unlike Material Design). Hopefully, with Google’s new focus on Chrome design, the developers will look to make the navigation bar fully transparent or give us the option of grabbing the bottom address bar.

You can download the latest version of Chrome Canary from the Play Store or from APK Mirror. Just keep in mind that this is ultimately an unstable preview version – we recommend that you stick to the standard version for your daily browsing sessions.