Material Design elements are making their way into Chrome OS at a snail’s pace. But, when you find something that can be setup in this new, sleek look, it’s kinda fun. The latest, at least as far as I can tell, is in Chrome 56 which allows you to enable the look on your Extension page. I’ll preface this with two points: First, I do not recall seeing this setting in Chrome OS 55 or earlier in the Stable channel. It has been in the beta and canary channel. Second, I’m assuming, but not sure, that this is in the Chrome browser as well. I use a Chromebook so I can’t verify. If you can verify this flag works in the Chrome browser, let me know and I will update this post with proper credit of course. Thanks to John Borgen for confirming that this feature is indeed in the latest build of Chrome browser!
The new Material Design extensions page is not enabled by default but it can easily be set with a flag inside of Chrome. That new flag is chrome://flags/#enable-md-extensions or you can just go chrome://flags and search Material Design and find it there (and a lot of other things that can get an MD make over.
Once you set this flag to enabled, you will need to restart Chrome and you are set. Then you can navigate to your Extensions page and you
Material Design Extension Page in Chrome OS
will see it in all of its Material Design glory.
Now, keep in mind that these are still experimental to an extent. In other words, things may not render perfectly and your browser could run slow. If you are going to enable this – or any other MD settings – do them one at a time so if things go poop, you know which one caused it.
Finally, if you haven’t figured out flags in Chrome, they can be quite a bit of fun! Check them out… but be careful. 🙂
Works on a current chrome browser in my.Mac.
Thanks John for confirming! I’ll update the post in a few minutes crediting you.