How to Enable Native Dark mode for Incognito Interface in Chrome

Recently we reported Google has begun working to improve incognito’s dark mode in Chrome. The new incognito window with the new change, will ignore Operating system light mode and other customizations and stays dark forever. Chrome Canary received a new flag to turn other menus in Incognito to dark as well today.

Chrome adds dark mode to incognito

Chrome comes with plenty of customization options built-in. You’ve various backgrounds and color themes to choose from in the New tab Customize menu.

Chrome Web Store offers themes including published by the Chrome team to make the Google browser look more beautiful.

You can apply these customizations to normal windows only, but not incognito windows.

Intentionally, Chrome uses a different theme for the incognito mode to keep it separate from normal browsing mode.

While the address bar, tab bar, and toolbar are dark, the menus aren’t. The app menu, context menu, and other elements still appear white. The chromium team decided to address this:

Going forward, Chrome applies dark mode for incognito User Interface by default and doesn’t consider Windows or Mac device light mode and other changes related to customization.

With the change, secondary menus and dialogs respect dark mode when a user opens the incognito window

You can put above dark mode changes to Incognito when you enable the following flag.

Here’s how to enable dark mode for the Incognito mode in Chrome

  1. Ensure you’re using Chrome Canary 91.0.4471.4, open it
  2. Visit chrome://flags
  3. Search for Incognito mode and enable “Allow widgets to inherit native theme from its parent widget”
    Allow widgets to inherit the native theme from its parent widget flag
  4. Restart the browser

After that, when you select the “New Incognito Window” option in the menu, everything excluding web content will appear as dark.

The dark mode brought by Google to Chrome when you open incognito may please your eyes and save battery as well. Let us know you liked it or not in the comments below.

More on Google Chrome

Chrome Shows Recent Google Drive open files on New Tab Page

After Android, Desktop Chrome to get Sharing Hub

How to Search Recently Closed Tabs on Chrome

Chrome lets you hide the Reading List button on the Bookmarks bar

Venkat Eswarlu

Venkat is an independent technology journalist and the founder of Techdows. He has been covering web browsers, Windows, and software news since 2009. His exclusive scoops on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge features have been cited by Forbes, TechCrunch, Wired, CNET, and other major publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *