Chrome 74 is officially out today for Windows, Mac, and Linux, marking the introduction of a new dark mode for Windows users. The same dark mode arrived last month on macOS with Chrome 73, and today’s update includes automatic Windows 10 support. Chrome 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.
While Google is enabling this new dark mode on Windows, the Google hasn’t fully enabled it on for all Chrome users just yet. “I can confirm that we are rolling out this feature to a small number of Chrome M74 users now, and that it will become more widely available in the near future,”
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
Another big change is the removal of Chrome’s ‘Data Saver’ feature for Android. It is being renamed as Lite Mode, which will continue to reduce data use while also helping to improve page load times—if Chrome predicts that a page will take longer than 5 seconds for the first text or image to show on screen, it will load a Lite version of the page instead, which are optimized to load much faster.
