Google’s Material You theme for smartphones has been largely limited to Android ever since it was released. It matches your phone’s entire look to the main colors of your wallpaper and soon it will make its way to other platforms including Windows, macOS, Linux, and others, at least for Google Chrome.
The latest Chrome Canary release, version 110, will bring Material You to the browser on Windows and the aforementioned platforms. This was spotted by Reddit user u/Leopeva64-2 and was posted on the r/Chrome subreddit.
Unlike smartphones, this version of Material You will only work for Chrome since the browser is unable to hook into your desktop wallpaper. The new update will allow Chrome to pick the main colors of any theme you choose and apply it across the browser. For instance, if you pick a wallpaper with blue as its most prominent color, then your entire browser will get the same shade of blue.
Take a look at the image below for reference.
If you happen to have the latest version of Chrome Canary, you will first need to enable it through chrome://flags/#customize-chrome-color-extraction flag. But since the feature is still under development, you will notice that there is no toggle button to switch the flag on or off.
You will have to turn off the flag again manually to use different colors for your address bar and tabs. Without it, your themes will continue to override your color of choice for the rest of the browser.
Here is another example of Material You on Chrome.
The feature will be more complete once it arrives on the public version of Chrome. Since it is already available on Canary, it should not be long before it is released to the stable version.
If you want to try out this feature before others, you can download the latest developer build for Chrome here.
