Thanks to Google's own leaks, we know that a system-wide dark mode is (finally) coming to Android via the Q release, but until all the apps we use have corresponding dark themes, it won't really matter. That's why we're excited to hear that Chrome for Android is planning a "dark mode experiment," likely similar to the dark theme available on Chrome for Windows.

The upcoming feature, posted to the Chromium Gerrit, was first spotted by 9to5Google yesterday. Apart from the fact that it's coming, we don't know too much else. The commit merely states:

[Dark] Add build flag and experiment flag This patch adds a build flag and an experiment flag for the dark mode experiment. It will exclude the night- resources in the build for now.

When it's implemented, the feature will be available first through an additional build flag at compile time (read: not available to most users), subsequently triggered via a new "enable-android-night-mode" flag according to the commit's associated "About Flags" change. Odds are it'll be a while before any of this ends up being user-facing in a shipping release, though.

There are plenty of questions remaining, like if Google will hold back the release of the feature until Android Q is out, or how it plans on handling site content that might otherwise conflict with the theme — a nice dark gray interface won't make much of a difference if it's only framing black text on a white page. We'll just have to see how Google handles it.