Google Chrome gets colorful — thanks to Android 12 'Material You' redesign

Google Chrome's user interface has never really been one for lavish design. That appears to be slowly changing, though, all thanks to Google’s newest design language, Material You, which pulls colors from your wallpaper and automatically applies it to your apps and other parts of the system UI.

Several apps have already begun to take on Material You's dynamic color theming, while Google Chrome itself is now soaking up the Android 12 'Material You' redesign. Google has been pottering away making changes to the UI over the last month or so, with them now becoming increasingly visible in more parts of Chrome for Android.

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First spotted by 9to5Google, the latest Chrome Canary build now adds dynamic color theming to the grid tab switcher. While it doesn't make the screen of your device scream out in technicolor, it certainly adds a touch of pizazz, as seen in the screenshots below.

Following the update, Material You lets once-white Chrome tabs take on the overarching color scheme of your device's wallpaper. As pictured in the 'Before' and 'After' images below, the current tab is highlighted using the darker shade, while other tabs extract and use the lighter purply hue from the current wallpaper. 

All of this follows Google's work on slowly adapting Chrome to the new Android 12 design language. Last month, it introduced a new Android flag, which updated Chrome's overflow menu with rounded corners. This is the menu found tucked behind the three-dot icon, now polished with a more curved aesthetic. Then, in the latest Chrome Canary Android build, Google introduced the '#dynamic-color-android' flag under chrome://flags to include full and wide-ranging support for Material You’s dynamic color theming. 

Should you wish to tinker with Google's new UI yourself, you can download the latest Chrome Canary build now. For this to work, remember that you'll need a compatible Google Pixel phone, which is running the latest Android 12 beta. Other users will have to wait for the stable release of Android 12, arriving sometime later this summer.