The chrome gets even hotter thanks to the large redesigned materials

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

As recently discovered in Chrome Gerrit, Google has updated its Dynamic Color Index on Chrome for Android to support full color extraction from materials. The browser will apply new hues through its user interface, which are unique to the wallpaper colors that Android 12 extracts. If you are using the Canary channel, you will be able to preview the updated look by activating two tags – copy and paste the following URL (in format in bold) in the Chrome address bar:

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

From left to right: main screen; Chrome home page; Find the Chrome home page.

From left to right: main screen; Chrome home page; Find the Chrome home page.

As mentioned above, Chrome will start to capture the colors sampled by Android 12 and apply them in its user interface. The home page and tab grid now have a subtle tint applied to their wallpapers which varies depending on the wallpaper selected on your phone. Notably, Chrome’s address bar gets a pop-up color, which complements the muted color nicely. The color is also visible when your device is in dark mode, which is quite stylish compared to the 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 to go mainstream. But even in its current working state, it fits perfectly with the aesthetic of Android 12 – and it looks good, too. Chrome is just one of many apps today to support Material You, and it’s becoming clear that Google still takes the implementation of its design theme (as opposed to Material Design) very seriously. Hopefully, with Google’s new focus on Chrome design, the developers will be looking to make the navigation bar completely transparent or give us the option to type in the lower address bar.

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