Part of the appeal of Google Chrome on the desktop is its simple and intuitive interface—allowing you to focus on the actual webpages you’re looking at. But there are ways to give the browser a fresh lick of digital paint, and customize the look to suit your tastes.
You’re likely to be spending a lot of time looking at your web browser, so it makes sense to take advantage of the personalization options—some of which you may not have realized are available inside Chrome. Here’s everything you can do in the latest version of Google Chrome for Windows and macOS.
Choose a new Chrome theme
The biggest change you can make to Google Chrome is to change its theme: This covers the colors of the tabs and toolbars, the background images and colors on the new tab page, and the accents used in menus and on dialogs. Open a new Chrome tab, then click Customize Chrome (bottom right) to see some color scheme options (with some themes, the Customize Chrome button is just a pencil icon).
Click any color swatch to apply it, and use the Light and Dark options to force Chrome into light or dark mode (the Device setting means Chrome follows the lead of Windows or macOS). If you want to choose your own color, click on the little color picker icon in the bottom-right corner of the grid.
To see even more theme options, choose Change theme. This brings you to a gallery of themes created by artists and picked out by Google. You’ll notice that these themes often come with attractive background images for the new tab page (use the Refresh daily toggle switch to automatically cycle between themes every day). You can also upload an image of your own, or choose a solid color.
Still unable to find something you like? Click the Chrome Web Store link at the bottom of the pop-out panel, and you can browse even more options. Open the Themes tab and you get plenty of choice, including themes developed by Google and themes submitted by other Chrome users. To apply a theme, click on it to see more details, then choose Add to Chrome.
The pop-out customization panel also has a Reset to default Chrome if your interface tweaking gets out of hand. Note that this will wipe out any custom themes you’ve added to the browser, so if you want to get back to them in the future, you might want to bookmark them in the Chrome Web Store.
Set other customization options
Besides theming, you can customize Chrome in a variety of other ways. Click the Customize Chrome button (or the pencil icon) in the bottom-right corner of the new tab page, and if you scroll down you’ll see you can set the shortcuts that appear when you open a new tab: You can curate your own shortcuts, show shortcuts for sites you visit a lot, or hide the shortcuts altogether.
If you’re opting to show your own shortcuts, use the Add shortcut button below the search bar to drop in a new web link. Once links are added, you can click and drag their icons to move them around the new tab page, and click the three dots besides an icon and Remove to delete any of your shortcuts.
Click Toolbar on the pop-out customization panel, and this gives you access to a few options for the toolbar. You’re able to choose which icons appear on the toolbar (from Home to History), and you can rearrange icons by clicking and dragging them on the toolbar itself.
You can find even more options by clicking the three dots in the top-right corner of any Chrome tab, then choosing Settings and Appearance. You can replace the new tab page with a site of your choice from this screen, as well as show or hide the bookmarks bar, customize the fonts used by Chrome, and choose whether the side panel appears on the right or the left.
Finally, it’s well worth browsing through the Chrome Web Store for third-party extensions relating to the user interface. A lot of these extensions enable you to do more with the new tab page and with the way tabs are displayed on screen, though you should be cautious about which extensions you install. To be able to operate effectively and integrate with Chrome, these extensions will need access to data such as your browsing history (each extension comes with user reviews and a privacy policy you can check).
