Google Chrome for Android Gets Dark Mode in Stable, Reader Mode Spotted in Canary: Reports

Google was testing dark mode for a while, and the feature is finally available on the latest stable version of Chrome for Android, as per a report. Separately, it has started testing a new Reader Mode in Chrome as well. The Reader Mode is only available for Chrome Canary for desktop users, and it essentially strips the page of all the unnecessary content, and keeps only the article text and its images on the page. Finally, Google is looking to prevent man-in-the-middle (MiTM) phishing attacks on embedded browser frameworks.

As mentioned, Chrome for Android stable version has finally received dark mode support, as per a report by Android Police. It is reportedly available with the Chrome v74 for Android release. However, in India, Google Play is only showing v73, and we were unable to install the APK from APK Mirror, receiving errors while trying to install the build on both Android 8.1 Oreo and Android 9.0 Pie devices. Your experience may vary, so do let us know if you could get the feature to work. To enable the dark mode toggle, users may still need to the #enable-android-night-mode flag, as the report is not very clear on this point. To recall, the dark mode feature was spotted in testing in February, and it has reportedly now finally trickled to the stable version as well. To recall, Mac users got dark mode support just last month, and now Android users have got it too.

Separately, Reader Mode is available in Chrome Canary for desktop users and users can enable the flag by visiting chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode section in their Chrome Canary version. Restart the browser once you've enabled the flag, and you will be able to use the Reader Mode by clicking on the top-right Chrome dropdown menu and selecting the Distill page option. The Reader Mode works best on news sites and other article-based websites, where it should remove all ads and other related links and only display the text and images. This feature was first spotted by Techdows.

Chrome reader mode spotted in Canary channel
Photo Credit: ZDNet

Additionally, in order to prevent man in the middle (MiTM) phishing attacks, Google will be blocking sign-ins from embedded browser frameworks starting in June. This is being implemented as Chrome cannot differentiate between a legitimate sign in and a MiTM attack on these platforms. Google announced this on its security blog, and is asking developers to switch to using browser-based OAuth authentication.