How To Enable Or Disable The New Chrome Design
Chrome has slowly been moving more and more towards Material design. Material design was originally meant for Android apps and was an attempt to unify the look of apps that were developed for the mobile platform. It’s resulted in some aesthetically appealing apps being developed for Android.. The design is now becoming a signature of all Google services and apps. Chrome is no different; there has been a slow but steady move towards Material design and with Chrome 67, the Material design roll out is still in progress. Most of it is still in beta though so to get the full experience, you have to use a Chrome Canary build. That said, if you wait a few release cycles, the stable version of Chrome will eventually add the complete Material look. If you’re running Canary now, you can enable the new Chrome design in it.
New Chrome Design
The new Chrome design is enabled and disabled via a Chrome flag. Open Chrome and enter the following in the address bar and enable it. This flag is available on the current stable version of Chrome and you can enable it now though it doesn’t bring much in terms of UI changes. Be warned that for Windows 10 users, this flag might cause the title bars to turn grey.
chrome://flags#top-chrome-md
Next, look for the following flag, and enable it as well. This flag is only present in Chrome Canary.
chrome://flags#uifood
Enable both these flags and relaunch Canary to apply the changes. If you’ve never paid a lot of attention to the UI, you might not notice much of a difference however Google will continue to migrate Chrome towards Material design and enabling these two flags will help you keep an eye on the changes, and to get them the second they’re added.
We should warn you that unless you have the patience for beta apps, you may not want to use Canary. Chrome’s beta versions aren’t very unstable but they may not play nice with your desktop. The current stable version of Chrome already appears to have a small, easily fixable UI bug on Windows 10 so forcing the Material design in Canary may have an impact on how well the browser runs.
There’s no ETA on when the new design will fully transition to the stable version of the browser but Google has slowly been enabling smalls aspects of it for almost a year now. If you recall, the Downloads and Settings page looked quite different just a while back.
