Edge powered by Microsoft’s Chromium has a dark mode, here’s how to enable it.
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Microsoft released test builds of Edge Chromium yesterday, and it packs a surprising number of features for such an early release. Microsoft says that some features, like dark mode, will be available later, but you can try them now. That is how.
Just like Chrome Pages, but they are Edge Pages
Microsoft’s decision to revamp the Edge browser using Chromium came with a lot of promise. Support for Chrome extensions, better touch support, and Chromium battery life are just a few examples. One that seems obvious in hindsight is Edge winning experimental flags.
Chrome’s experimental flags are a subset of the Pages feature that you can use to test upcoming unfinished features. And with Microsoft’s Edge Chromium, you’ll see the same concept in play. The only difference is that instead of typing chrome:// to start, you’ll use edge:// instead.
The experiments page contains three particularly cool settings to enable: dark mode, grouped tabs, and smooth scrolling.
How to activate dark mode
We assume that you have already installed and run the Edge Chromium setup. To get started, you’ll open a new tab and type edge://flags and then hit enter.
You can then search for or navigate to the flag you want (if you know the name). To turn on dark mode, find the “Microsoft Edge Theme” option and toggle the dropdown from Default to On.
You will be prompted to restart your browser. You can do it now or wait until you set other flags.
If you don’t see the dark theme, you probably have Windows light theme turned on. These Edge settings will respect Windows color settings, so right-click on your desktop and choose the customize option. Then click Colors on the right side of the settings dialog and change the color dropdown to dark.
Update: If you want to enable Edge’s dark theme without enabling system-wide dark mode, simply add the –force-dark-mode option to the Edge shortcut the same way you would with Chrome.
Other cool flags: grouped tabs and smooth scrolling
If you want to try grouped tabs, go back to the edge://flags screen and search for Tab Groups. Change that option from Default to Enabled.
Now when you have tabs open you can right click on them and choose to add them to a new or existing group. Unfortunately, you can’t rename the groups, so they will be populated with generic names like Group 0, Group 1, etc. But adding a tab to a group will immediately move it next to the other tabs in that same group. Groups will allow you to separate work and play (or tabs by subject) without having to open as many windows.
Finally, you can repeat this process to enable Smooth Scrolling, which honestly… did nothing in our tests. Not yet, at least. Microsoft is hard at work on this feature and we expect smooth scrolling to go live soon. Still, it’s there if you want to try.
Find the smooth scrolling option and change Default to enabled.
Hopefully as updates come this will improve. Currently, we can tell the difference between scrolling in the standard Edge browser, Chrome, and Edge Chromium (with the standard Edge performing better). We expect better scrolling in Chromium browsers.
You’ll find quite a few other flags that can be enabled, most of them are more technical in nature (like the zero-copy rasterizer), so play with these at your own risk.
