Chrome 77 makes it easy to create your own Chrome browser theme in just a few clicks. Choose your favorite colors for Chrome’s browser toolbar and set a snazzy background image right from the New Tab page.
How to Enable the New Customization Tools
These features aren’t enabled by default in Chrome 77, but they’re still there: You just have to enable a few hidden flags.
As always with flags, Chrome’s flags may change or be removed at any time. We expect the flags to vanish soon when Google enables this feature by default for everyone soon.
To enable Chrome’s new customization, type chrome://flags into Chrome’s Omnibox, also known as the address bar. Type “NTP” into the search box on the Flags page.
Enable both the “Chrome Colors menu” and “NTP customization menu version 2” flags. Just click the box to the right of each and select “Enabled.”
Your changes won’t take effect until you restart Chrome. Click the “Relaunch Now” button that appears to do so. Be sure to save any work you have in Chrome’s tabs. Chrome will automatically reopen your current tabs when it restarts, but the contents of those tabs—for example, information typed into text boxes on web pages—may be lost.
How to Customize Your Chrome Browser
You can now customize your Chrome browser theme right from the New Tab page.
Full Chrome browser themes are still available and are a little more powerful than this—but just a little. It’s now quick and easy to personalize your Chrome browser without choosing the colors someone else likes.
To get started, click the “Customize” button at the bottom-right corner of Chrome’s New Tab page.
You’ll see options to select your browser’s color and theme, background image, and shortcut preference here.
To choose your preferred colors, click “Color and theme” and click one of the color combinations. You don’t have to select any of these combinations—you can click the eyedropper icon at the top left corner of the list of colors to get a color picker. This will let you select any color you prefer. Chrome will automatically choose a lighter, similar shade to match the precise color you pick.
To select a background image for your New Tab page, click “Background” in the left pane and choose an image. You can select a category and an individual image or enable “Refresh daily” to get a new background image every day.
You can also select “Upload From Device” and select any background image you prefer or keep “No Background” selected for a cleaner look. If you choose “No Background,” Chrome will choose a background color from your theme.
Finally, you can choose how you want the shortcuts below the search box to appear. Select “My Shortcuts” to choose your own shortcuts, “Most visited sites” to have Chrome automatically put your most visited websites here, or “Hide shortcuts” to disable shortcuts entirely for a cleaner look.
You can’t hide the search box on the New Tab page right now. There was a flag named “Remove fakebox from the NTP” that hid this box in previous versions of Chrome, but it was removed from Chrome 77.