Google is working on adding support to Chrome for dark mode in macOS Mojave. Although the new feature is available now as an early beta, Google has a number of problems to solve to make the new feature work …
In a succinct bug report, a developer summarises the situation.
One particular challenge for Chrome is that it currently uses its own app-specific dark mode to signal incognito mode.
- Figure out how dark mode should look in the Refresh look
- Implement it
Additionally, Google can’t use some of the workarounds it has with incognito mode.
An early version of it can currently be enabled in the latest version of Chrome Canary, though many of the colors are simply placeholders for now. Download Canary, then run the following Terminal command:
For Incognito mode (which is currently dark), developers used to call chrome.browserAction.setIcon() for every tab and use a lighter browser action icon when the tab is in an incognito window. But this workaround can’t be used to deal with dark themes, nor with the new dark mode, because there is no clue if the current theme is light or dark, and whether Mojave’s dark mode is turned on or off.
/Applications/Google\ Chrome\ Canary.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome\ Canary –force-dark-mode
If you haven’t yet tried Dark Mode in Mojave, check out our how-to-guide.
