macOS Mojave’s dark mode is coming to Google Chrome

Enlarge / Google Chrome in macOS Mojave. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple added dark mode to macOS with its Mojave software update in September. Since then, third-party apps have been adding dark themes to go along with it, but there have been a handful of notable outliers, like Slack and Google Chrome. We’ve now learned that the latter of those will get a formal dark mode in an upcoming release, likely Chrome 73.

As noted on Reddit and reported by MacRumors, a code change was submitted to Chromium on December 5 that lays the groundwork for the future public release. Here are the notes on the change from the Chromium issue page:

Mac: Change dark mode optout logic and respond to system changes

This change hooks up the “DarkMode” feature, allowing for three states
in Mojave:
– –force-dark-mode for dark appearance unconditionally
– –enable-feature=DarkMode to track system dark mode status
– No flags/default state is light appearance unconditionally

Since we build with an SDK < 10.14, we still need the Info.plist
key, but it now must be false.

Some related changes:
– Make Omnibox tint respond to OnNativeThemeChanged
– React immediately to changes in high-contrast mode setting

Chromium is the first stop for changes to Chrome, with more steps along the way like the beta release, before the changes finally make it to the public release. Even in Chromium, the feature requires digging into code to activate, so this is early along. But dark mode is clearly on the way.