How to change the New Tab Page background in Chrome
Dark themes are slowly becoming more common. Both macOS and Windows 10 have a dark theme and it won’t be long before iOS and Android have one too. The change will be slow because apps will have to adapt to it as well. A dark theme is going to be added in a later version of Chrome. Until then, you might want to do something about the New Tab Page background which is a blinding white. Here are two solutions that let you change the New Tab page background from white to something dark.
Chrome Theme
Chrome has themes that allow you to change the color of the title bar and the New Tab page background. You can download these themes from the Chrome web store. We recommend trying the Just Black theme (pictured below) or if you want something that doesn’t go all black, you can try Material Simple Dark Grey which gives you a nice grey background instead.
New Tab page background image
If you don’t feel like using a Chrome theme because it modifies other aspects of the UI that you don’t want to change, you can always change the background to an image that’s dark.
Open Chrome and open a new tab page. Click the little cog wheel button at the bottom and from the menu, select Upload an Image.
Select any image that you want to use. Pick something that has dark colors and when it uploads, you will have a dark background on the new tab page. This method does have a shortcoming. When you open the new tab page, you will momentarily see the old white background which is akin to a flash going off but then the dark background loads and it’s okay after that.
The white flash is a known bug in Chrome which, as yet, hasn’t been resolved just yet. This is what makes using a theme a better option since there are no white flashes when you open a new tab.
If you’re on Windows 10, you can use the Night Light feature and turn your screen a slightly warmer color. It should take some of the shock out of opening a blindingly bright new tab page. Alternatively, you can also install the Flux Chrome extension and tint your browser a warmer color instead of tinting your entire screen. The ability to change the background of a new tab page to any image of your choice is a new one and was added in a recent Chrome update.
