Chrome 50 is starting to roll out to all of Chrome's platforms, but it's Chrome OS that will see the biggest change. With version 50, Chrome OS gets a Material Design makeover. Sebastien Gabriel, a senior designer at Google, detailed the changes on his webpage.

"Material Design" is the name for Google's company-wide interface guidelines that started on Android with version 5.0 Lollipop. The Chrome revamp keeps the same basic Chrome layout but makes a lot of little design tweaks. The whole app is flatter—the gradient in the tab bar is removed, along with shadows around the active tab. The menu button now looks like something from Android—a vertical column of three dots. Bookmark folders and fonts are different, most of the buttons and pop-ups have been overhauled, and Incognito mode now has a sneaky, all-dark UI.

There are under-the-hood improvements, too. The Material Design interface is now "rendered fully programmatically," allowing Google to nix the 1,200 image files it was using for icons and other UI bits. The move to vectors allows Chrome to better support a wide range of screen resolutions. There's also a new "Hybrid" UI for touchscreen devices that spaces things out a bit.

The new interface should kick in on Chrome OS automatically. Users on Windows and Mac can try the new interface by downloading Chrome Canary, typing "Chrome://flags" into the address bar, and turning on the "Material Design in the browser's top chrome" option. Gabriel warns that these designs are still a work in progress on Windows and Mac.