Back in February, new commits on the Chromium Gerrit that showed that Google was all set to bring ‘Material Design 2’ to its Chrome web-browser. The company then started testing the new design language in April amidst reports that the new design philosophy will go live on the stable channel on Google Chrome’s birthday, September 2nd. Latest developments now show that the company may be on course to meet that time-frame.
According to open-source Chromium evangelist, François Beaufort, the new design language is now being rolled out to the latest builds of Chrome on the Canary channel for Windows, Linux and Chrome OS. It will apparently also be available for Mac users, but they will need to turn it on manually by setting a couple of experimental flags.
The new interface comes with a number of visual tweaks, including a new address bar, redesigned tabs and updated colors. According to Beaufort, the Omnibox suggestion icons, tab strip coloring, pinned tabs and alert indicators will also see some changes as part of the new design overhaul.
As can be seen in the image shared by Beaufort, the address bar now has rounded ends, giving it a more elliptical shape, while the tabs will also have a more rectangular shape with rounded edges, which looks distinctly different from their current trapezoidal shapes.
Meanwhile, Google may also revamp Chrome on Android fairly soon. One of the new features that’s expected to hit the Android version of the browser is a horizontal tab-switcher that the company has been testing in recent builds of the software, keeping in line with the new horizontal app-switcher that has been introduced in the latest build of Android P Beta.
