Google Chrome 74 is officially rolling out today for Windows, Mac, and Linux, marking the introduction of a new dark mode for Windows 10 users. The same dark mode arrived last month on macOS with Chrome 73, and today’s update includes automatic Windows 10 support. It will automatically theme itself to match if a dark mode is enabled on Windows 10. The end result makes Chrome look almost identical to the browser’s darker Incognito Mode menu bars.
Google is definitely enabling this new dark mode on Windows, but the company hasn’t fully switched it on for all Chrome users just yet. “I can confirm that we are rolling out this feature to a small number of M74 users now, and that it will become more widely available in the near future,” according to a Chrome community manager. If you don’t want to wait for Google to fully enable this, there’s a shortcut trick to force dark mode:
- Find the shortcut you use to launch Chrome and open the properties
- Add “–force-dark-mode” to the end of the target location (without quotes)
- Launch Chrome and dark mode will be enabled. If you usually launch Chrome from a pinned taskbar item, you’ll need to right click the shortcut trick and then unpin / pin to taskbar again for this to hold.
Chrome has always offered theme support to enable a dark mode of sorts, but this official mode now means that context menus are properly themed across the browser and you’ll be able to read the download bar properly. Build 74 also includes a number of other changes that aren’t as obvious to spot visually. Chrome’s animation features can now be disabled to reduce motion sickness, and there’s a new flag to block websites from detecting Incognito Mode.
Chrome 74 is available to download from Google’s Chrome site, or from help > About Chrome if you’re already using the browser.
