Microsoft Edge has brought in the option to force a dark mode on web pages even if they don’t support it, giving it another feature to tempt people over from Google Chrome.
Based on the same engine Chrome’s dark mode uses, Edge's version will change the color of a website’s background, text, and other elements on the page, effectively forcing a dark mode on to a site. For people who do a lot of evening web surfing, this forced dark mode will make flipping through web pages less of an eye strain.
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Google Chrome used to also force a dark mode onto websites, which was a feature of its Canary experimental browser that users had to enable. Google has since removed the option.
But phones site MobiGyaan discovered such a feature is still in the Edge browser. However, it also has to be forcefully enabled as it doesn’t exist in a simple drop-down option or sub-menu in the browser.
How to enable forced dark mode in Microsoft Edge
Our sibling site TechRadar noted that to do this you will need to type edge://flags/#enable-force-dark into Edge’s address bar, which then serve you up an option to enable “Force Dark Mode for Web Contents.” Once enabled, you then need to restart Edge and then the forced dark mode will be activated.
With it up and running you’ll then notice that when you visit a site Edge will alter the color scheme to work with darker tones. The effects are varied, with TechRadar reporting that sometimes the forced dark mode will affect everything on a webpage and at other times it will leave some elements, such as the color of images, unchanged.
It’s a small addition that many people might gloss over. But the fact that a forced dark mode is in Edge and no longer in Chrome could tempt some people over from Google’s browser onto Microsoft’s web surfing app.
