Themes support now lets you reskin Chrome

The latest developer version of Chrome can easily be reskinned. This shows the Camo theme. To compare to Snowflake and the default, see below.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google's Chrome tries to make a virtue out of its minimally intrusive browser interface, but that doesn't stop people from wanting to change its colors. So customization fans probably will be happy to learn that themes are now activated in the newest developer release of Google's browser.

Themes have been gradually getting simpler to activate in the browser, but they became enabled by default in the newest developer releases this week, version 3.0.195.3 and a hasty bug-fix release Wednesday night, version 3.0.195.4. No longer must you mess with pesky "--enable-extensions" command-line switches or other nitty-gritty options.

When you point Chrome to a theme's URL, the browser will offer to save it, a process that installs it, too.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

If you're using the new Chrome developer release, there are two sample themes available, Camo and Snowflake. To activate them, click the link then agree to save the CRX file. Chrome will then switch themes and give you a yellow alert it did so.

Google is working on making this easier. In the tools menu, clicking "Options" and then "Personal Stuff," there's a "Themes" section with a "Get Themes" button. So far the Web site it links to is empty, but presumably it will be populated with some themes soon enough.

(Update 8:51 p.m. PDT: If you want to make your own themes beyond Google's two samples, Google has published a draft themes design document that explains how.)

The themes also work on Mac OS X, though the options dialog box has a tantalizing color picker that I couldn't get to do anything.

Themes work on Chrome for Mac OS X, too.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The options dialog box also includes an option to reset the theme to Chrome's default. However, it appears there's not much in the way of theme management at present; to switch themes, you'll have to reinstall them from the Web or your hard drive.

Not every Chrome user can try themes so easily yet. Google typically introduces these changes with the developer release before spreading them to the slower-moving, better tested beta and stable versions.

Chrome's options dialog box now lets you change themes, though for now it links to an empty Web site.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google evidently has high hopes for Chrome themes. Trying to reproduce what it's done letting people reskin the iGoogle personalized home page service, Google is trying to coax artists to volunteer themes for Chrome. According to The New York Times, a number of those artists declined to offer their work for free.

Themes in the browser are an element of Chrome's nascent extensions system, a high priority in development at present. Extensions can customize what the browser can do, and they're a big advantage Firefox has over rival browsers.

The themes change the color of the frame behind the row of tabs, with inactive tabs becoming somewhat translucent to show a blurred version of what's behind them. Other elements such as the status bar and find tool also shift colors accordingly. The background image on the new new-tab page also gets a related graphic--and by the way, that more interactive new-tab page is now activated by default.

The new version also adds support for the HTML 5 video tag, Google said. That feature is a centerpiece of browser makers' efforts to propagate "open Web" standards that permit richer Web sites and Web applications that don't rely on plug-ins such as Adobe Flash.

Below you can see the Snowflake and default themes.

If you're not aggro enough for Camo, try the Snowflake theme.

(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Chrome's default theme. If you don't like blue, you should have other options soon.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

[RobinQueens]

Great! Still no OSx version of it , lame!

[Shankland]

There's no Mac OS X version in beta or stable release form, but I use the developer version. It's getting gradually less unstable, but Flash still doesn't work.

[Bl00dmetal93]

to get flash to work you need to add --enable-plugins to the launcher its not working 100% but its quite stable

[mjconver]

No Adblock Plus? Not interested.

[PacGamer]

I love chrome, but that is the entire reason why I have switched entirely yet. I need my ABP.

[t8]

Good.

The Web runs on advertising, and some want a free ride.
There will always be freeloaders in society, usually they are people who do not understand business and think the world actually owes them something.

I don't think Google really cares about catering for your freeloading ways.

That is my opinion anyway.

[Bl00dmetal93]

thats why you should use privoxy as it does the same as ad block plus but it blocks ads for any program that connects to the web.

[Darwa]

I use Ad Muncher - it works outside of your browser. You can find it on this site at: http://download.cnet.com/Ad-Muncher/3000-7786_4-10130181.html?tag=mncol

But yeah, GC is no FF......yet :)

[dannosliwcd]

The reason Google is able to provide all this free software is mostly due to their ad revenue. I do think bandwidth-sucking flash ads need to die, but most Adblock Plus users tend to be freeloaders, as t8 put it, just blocking every ad out there.

[Atomic1fire]

when I was using ABP, I would turn it off or add exceptions to certain sites,
ocassionally, I would get a virus prompt from a particuler advertisement page, so using adblock would be nessesary.

[sexydaddio]

Tried Chrome, it's not that great!

[DatabaseDoctor]

Neat features but not fully baked as of yet. Does anyone else have hesitations about software from Google where everything is in Beta for decades before its production? Not in my browser where I develop, online bank and other activities that make my life what it is... gmail beta for years? Sure if I need a throwaway email address to not give out my main email. Google docs beta? To throw non-sensitive docs or spreadsheets so that I can share quickly or "take home work". If Google thought it cute to label things BETA for years, the penalty for such behavior is that I will not use your tools for anything production if you yourselves don't think its "done" yet.

Firefox for me as my primary browser with IE as a forced upon second browser. Chrome? I'll wait till next decade when it becomes production to try it out.

[dannosliwcd]

Going by what the state of completion that the developer puts in the title doesn't work as well as it should. So many people release extremely buggy 'final' builds of products that take weeks of patches to actually complete. Google's GMail service has never given me any less than I expected from a complete product even though I used it for years in its beta state. I think it's good that Google plans ahead enough to say what needs to be done before the beta tag is removed, and that they iron out the kinks and let curious users test it (and begin developing and testing products to work with it, such as GreaseMonkey scripts) _before_ removing the beta tag. That way when the tag is removed, new users can be confident that it will actually work as advertised, and accessory developers have a head start on their work.

[exactlyy]

chrome browser just sucks .. i wonder why some people like it.
if you like its interface, you can get the same in firefox, with chromify extreme theme .. and you'll also keep all your addons .

[virgilp]

I like it because it doesn't suck up all my memory. Leave FFox open for a day, and you get half a Gb memory consumption. Close&reopen - it stays at ~90Mb. Tooo much memory leaks. Also, Chrome is faster, especially at JS. On some sites it matters. And I love the ability to pull out a tab into a separate window.

The only reason why chrome isn't my primary borwser yet is probably AdBlock.

[Gazz6037]

Why wouldn't you like Chrome? As virgilp said before, FF is a big memory hog. It's also a lot quicker at loading webpages. It's also more secure (at the security conference where safari was hacked within 10 seconds chrome was the only browser that couldn't be cracked) than FF where even Mozilla admits there are security issues. The only reason why IMO chrome isn't catching on is because of extensions, but that's kind of obvious. I've been using chrome since it was released as a beta and everyone I have introduced it to has loved it. Most people just want simplicity, speed and security. That's what chrome offers.

Cheers, Brian.

[t8]

Yes the interface is good and Firefox probably has a clone.
But try loading Chrome and Firefox together.

Chrome beats it by a country mile. Even the tabs open faster in Chrome and try dragging a tab out of Firefox into it's own Window and back again.

Also, Chrome provides quite a bit more real estate and you can resize text boxes (like the one I am tying in now) which I find very useful. I hate small text boxes as you can't see your post in it's entirety.

I do like Firefox however and the add ons are great.

My 2 cents worth.

[Scykei]

Google's idea was so good, other web browsers started copying its browser. You know, Safari, and also FireFox are now planning to follow Chrome's tabs-on-top and the "One bar for everything".

Did you read this article (CNet): http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10299350-12.html?tag=mncol;title
The new FireFox sketches mimic Google Chrome's.

I am sort of looking forward to Google Chrome OS seeing that most Google products are fast. The browser is fast, GMail is fast, etc.

[exactlyy]

Thanks for all your replys guys , the point is , Speed doesnt matter.. if you visit internet explorer 8 homepage they claim that IE8 is the fastest, Opera also claimes to be the fastest browser available..the same with Safari,FF and chrome. and to be honest if you you have a fast internet connection you just cant tell which one is the fastest cuz we're talkin here about miliseconds ..
i agree about the memory leak but when you have 2 or 3 GB or RAMs .then actually it also doesnt matter and it would not affect your system at all even if you open FF with 10 TABS for 24 hours .. and for the people with less memory ..there is a program " Firefox Ultimate Optimizer" google it... and its tested you use it and firefox w'll only uses 30 kb of memory :)
and chrome starting up faster ..well i agree but have you asked yourself why ??
its a startup prog that misses a lot like RSS feed "dont know if they added it " and a password manager " password master " so no need for hacking..anyone with access to your computer can see all your saved passwords .

[paralityk]

Dude you're all wrong... just try those two classic examples of Chrome (webkit actually) performance
http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/browsermation/
http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/gravity/
For more of this stuff (there are tons of it) visit chromeexperiments.com :)

[Scykei]

Chrome loads web pages more quickly than other web browsers. It also has the fastest JavaScript.

paralityk is right. Go to http://www.chromeexperiments.com/ and test some of the experiments there. Compare them with FireFox and Chrome. You can see that Chrome is faster than other browsers by three times in some cases.

The point is, with Google Chrome, you can do things that you could never have done in other browsers because they aren't strong enough. Firefox will catch up soon but by that time, Google will be even faster. They are way ahead of other browsers.

[misaoblog]

I like both of them but imo Chrome is light-weight and faster than Firefox. If it has more addons like Adblock Plus, i will switch to it immediately.

But for now i'm still using Firefox.

[explodingzebras]

Firefox 3.5 is great, and its quick enough for me. Chrome lacks all the great extensions atm, especially AdblockPlus. Even works fine on my old 400mhz/2GB powermac G4! Also Chrome is still not available for Linux or Mac atm, and i don't want to use an alpha until it comes out. As for ******** about Googles beta programs, Google has just taken Gmail and others out of beta. Gmail is my favourite email provider, i use it as my main account with IMAP on all machines. As for yahoo mail, its horrible, I only use it for signing up to crap.

[miaminica]

I'm all for eye-candy but this is not enough to make Chrome my default browser. Google should get it's act together and get full extension support and features in Chrome.

Right now I only use Chrome for Gmail.

[01Phyxius]

I use both FF and Chrome, depending on the situation. FF has a great overall experience, due addons, but is a huge memory hog and is extremely slow to load, at least on my 6-year-old computer. I would love for chrome to become a real competitor, but for now its mainly my default because it is fast.

[Guido11450]

I agree. My computer is about as old as yours, and it takes firefox a few minutes to load, and the memory usage is horrific when it finally does. I use chrome as a default, and when I need to get somewhere now, but firefox is so feature rich, I can't help but not use it every once in a while (even if it does take an eternity to start up).

As for theme support, i think it is a step in the right direction for chrome, and something tells me will be seeing extensions and a really fast alternative to firefox out of it very soon. There are already some extensions, although you need the developer version, a bit of patience and some technical knowhow (but I'm guessing that's why they are in the developer version for now).

[Darwa]

I agree completely with the people that are essentially saying that Google Chrome is all talk and no walk.

Work on extensions first, then worry about skinning.

ADBlock+ for Chrome
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46974

[d0od]

There are already plenty of extensions around for Chrome - including an adblocker! Sure, you have to be using the dev version - but it's very stable. Just add --enable-extensions to your launcher then install the adblock.crx file in teh article below. Works flawlessly!

Adblock: http://www.fritscher.ch/blog/2009/04/20/google-chrome-adblock-without-proxy/

ADsweep was very good, but no more development.
I recommende ADBlock+ extension.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46974

ADBlock+ has editable filter is very good.

[v8mumbo]

Does Chrome work properly yet on 64-bit Windows 7?

Would like to try it when it does.

[MacSnob]

Why does Google put so much effort into superficialities and not dealing with their issues in not being able to resolve web server address? Besides Safari is faster.

[d3wlin]

I'm so pleasant Google made themes available the easy way. Also I found a site in development here at www.chromethemes.com