Google Chrome is testing Material You colour theming

Chrome is the latest product from Google to adopt the company’s trendy ‘Material You’ theming engine. However, since the design rules for Material You are half-baked, I can foresee some issues arising with this in the future.

To test out the new feature, you need to get Google’s beta browser, Chrome Canary. This browser is essentially the same as standard Chrome, but it gets new features first for beta testing. You also need to ensure you’re on Canary version 110 or newer.

From there, you need to input chrome://flags/ into your search bar to get into the secret Google settings panel. Once it loads, search for ‘Customize Chrome Color Extraction’ and enable it.

The first major limitation of this browser extension is that it takes its colour choice from the wallpaper you set on your new page screen on Chrome. I’d have rather it take the colour from the wallpaper on my computer, similar to how it works on Android phones. It also only seems to work with stock Google wallpapers. Any custom uploads don’t seem to change colours in my testing.

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This is where things get a little convoluted since there are no well-defined rules for how Material You should work. I was hoping that Google would attach the Material You-themed colours from your phone to the rest of your Google products. Ideally, this would establish a colour profile for each member of your family, and when they interacted with things like Google TVs and smart displays, those devices would adopt that colour to unify and personalize that person’s software and hardware.

However, Google seems to be taking more of a nearsighted approach to implementing the feature. I can see this as being strange for people running Chrome OS in the near future if Material You gets rolled out there with more consistency. Are we expected to have both Chrome and Chrome OS adopt different colours based on separate aspects of the ecosystem?

As Google builds towards the Pixel ecosystem with the launch of the Pixel Watch and Buds, the company needs to spend more time thinking about how to connect all of its devices, not how to fracture them.

Via: Android Police