Last update: November 15, 2022 at 07:06 UTC+01:00
Google Chrome on the desktop does not change its theme based on the wallpaper like it does on Android smartphones and tablets. If you’re on Android, all Google apps change the colors of some of their UI elements to match the home screen wallpaper, thanks to the Material You dynamic theme feature. Taking inspiration from it, Google extends the dynamic theme to the latest version 110 of Chrome Canary.
The latest Chrome Canary v110 brings the Material You dynamic theme to macOS, Windows 10/11, ChromeOS, and even Linux. It was spotted by a Redditor, and interestingly, the dynamic theme on the Google Chrome desktop works a bit differently than on Android.
Since Google Chrome doesn’t snap to your desktop wallpaper, as noted by Redditor, Google Chrome on the desktop changes the theme to the dominant color of the wallpaper you set it to. Chrome’s new tab page. However, for this to work, you need to enable the chrome://flags/#customize-chrome-color-extraction flag.
Once the flag is enabled, each time you change the new tab wallpaper, Google Chrome changes the theme. There is one caveat though, the theme change only happens when switching to a wallpaper provided in one of Google’s collections. Using your own image will not change the UI theme and will remain on the previous theme.
While not a big deal, it does make the browser feel more personal, similar to how Material You does on Android. From now on, you need to install Google Chrome Canary to take advantage of this new Material You dynamic theme, but it shouldn’t be long before the feature arrives in the stable version of the browser.
