Google Chrome on Windows 10 will finally support themed titlebars

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The window control buttons (minimize, full screen, close) in Windows have gone through a number of design changes over the years. Each change was implemented as part of a certain design language from the team at Microsoft. When something like this changes from one version of Windows to another though, it can have some negative impacts on custom themes that other applications use. So for a while now, if you themed the Chrome title bar in Windows 10 it would actually change the aging window control buttons from Windows 7. However, that is changing now that Google’s engineers have merged this new commit to enable it by default.

Those who enjoy a themed title bar on Chrome have been experiencing this issue since Microsoft moved away from the old style of window control buttons in Windows 7. So for years, people were forced to continue using that old style if they wanted to apply a title bar theme in the browser. However, about a year ago in the Canary build of version 58 of Chrome, some people within the community found a workaround to fix the issue. You could either add a special flag when launching the Chrome.exe file or you could toggle the new feature using the hidden flag chrome://flags/#windows10-custom-titlebar.

Once enabled, you could then apply a title bar theme and it would continue using the Windows 10 style control buttons that many prefer. As with most beta features that get introduced into the Canary build of Chrome, this hidden flag slowly made its way into the stable build with fans of title bar themes opting to enable it almost instantly. It looks as if Google is finally confident with its current iteration as a new commit has been merged that tells us Windows 10 Custom Titlebar feature flag will be enabled by default.

So for anyone who has stopped using Chrome’s custom title bar theme feature because of this issue, you can rest assured that you can use your favorite themes without needing to toggle a hidden Chrome flag.