A big attraction of Material You, Google's newest design language, is the new theming system that automatically extracts colors from your wallpaper and applies it to various parts of the system UI and apps. Although there isn’t a long list of apps that support Material You’s dynamic color theming at the moment, Google is already adapting its apps to follow Android 12’s new design language. Google Chrome is one of the few apps that has slowly been adapting to the new design language.
Last month we saw Google adding a new #theme-refactor-android flag in Chrome 90, which updated the browser's overflow menu with rounded corners. Then in Chrome Canary 93.0.4561, which rolled out earlier this month, Google added proper support for Material You's dynamic theming with a new "#dynamic-color-android" flag. This flag added dynamic colors to Chrome's Settings header and a few other parts of the browser. Now, 9to5Google reports that the latest version of Chrome Canary brings dynamic theming in one more part of the browser: the grid tab switcher.
With the latest update, Chrome's tab switcher grid has been themed to match the dominant color scheme of your wallpaper, as you can see in the screenshots below. The current tab is highlighted using the darker shade, while other tabs use a lighter shade extracted from the current wallpaper.
If you have a Pixel phone running the latest Android 12 beta and want to see Chrome's new dynamic color scheme in action, copy and paste this flag into Chrome’s address bar: chrome://flags#theme-refactor-android. Now click on the drop-down menu, select “Enabled,” and restart the browser. Next up, paste this flag in the address bar: chrome://flags#theme-refactor-android, enable it and restart the browser again.
If you want to play around with the new UI, you can download the latest version of Chrome Canary from the link below. Do note that you'll need a supported Pixel phone running the latest Android 12 beta.
Screenshots courtesy: 9to5Google