How to Enable Hidden Dark Mode in Microsoft Chromium Edge Browser
Microsoft released beta versions of its Chromium-based Edge browser earlier this week , and it was a pleasure to try it out – mainly because it seems so familiar to anyone who has been a Chrome fan. However, that doesn’t mean Edge is just a modified version of Google’s browser. There are tons of customizations, including a completely new way to unlock the browser’s hidden “dark mode” that works well with your application’s settings in Windows itself.
If you want Edge to be more like a browser that the Addams family can use, unlocking its built-in dark mode is easy. Download it (at the moment it is desirable to build “Dev” ) and enter this in the address bar: edge://flags
Looks familiar? A must have if you’ve ever fiddled with Chrome settings under the hood. Now in Edge, you need to do a quick search for “theme.” You should open a screen that looks like this (I’ve already enabled this option, and you should do it next!):
Close and reopen your browser … and it will most likely look different. This is because, as stated in the description for the “Microsoft Edge theme,” your browser is Force based on the app theme you choose on Windows, light or dark.
To navigate from one to the next, right-click on the Windows desktop and select Personalize, or open the Start menu, type this word and select Themes and Related Settings. Your choice. Click on “Colors” in the sidebar and scroll down a bit until you see the “Choose default application mode” option. Switching from light to dark or vice versa changes the appearance of your various on-screen elements in Windows 10, including compatible apps, unless they have specific settings of their own that you have to tweak within the app itself.
That’s all! Light. But if you’re just testing Edge but still want to experience dark mode in other browsers, that’s easy too.
In Chrome, you need to right-click the icon in the taskbar, right-click Google Chrome again, and select Properties. Find the line “Target”, place the cursor at the very end, press the spacebar and enter two minus signs followed by “force-dark-mode” without quotes. (Every time I type this into our CMS, the two minus signs change to a hyphen, for which I apologize.)
When you’re done, the line should look like this:
Click OK. The next time you open Chrome, everything goes blank. I’ll admit I’m not a big fan of Google’s implementation versus Microsoft because the Chrome menus are nearly impossible to read, but obviously this feature still needs some work. “True” dark mode for Windows may appear as early as Chrome 74, so hopefully this is just a temporary measure.
As far as Firefox is concerned, it’s simple. Open your browser, click the hamburger icon in the upper right corner and select Add-ons, or simply use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + Shift + A anywhere in the browser to bring up the screen. Click on Themes and you will be prompted to switch between light, dark, and standard. (The latter will install in your Firefox browser everything you installed on Windows, similar to what you just did for Edge.)