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Change Background Colour to White in Chrome's Incognito

Sarah Richards |

Now that Google is under progress to apply Material Design on its products, it'd be nice of them if they didn't use a dark background for Chrome's Incognito new tabs.

So does anyone know a way to change the background colour in Incognito tabs to white? I already tried few themes that didn't work.

Chrome is up to date, running under Windows 10 64-bit, and no specific pages on start-up.

NOTE: For the people who are suggesting, or will be suggesting, using Chrome's flags in chrome://flags/, this won't work and see it for yourselves:

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4 Answers

Download this theme from the Chrome Web Store and add it to Chrome; it should resolve your problem, although the message in the centre "You’ve gone incognito" will still be on a dark background.

2

I am currently using a self-made extension that overtakes the new tab page and replaces it with an empty HTML page based on the solution in: Change Chrome New Tab Page to local file

However, there will be a need to modify Chrome's executable files, otherwise you'll be welcomed with a pop-up message about using a developer mode extension every time you launch Chrome. This answer from Stackoverflow.com should help you in this regard yet you will have to run the batch file every time Chrome is updated.

  1. Create a folder somewhere in you computer, let's call it whitebg.

  2. Launch your favourite text editor (e.g. Notepad) and paste this piece of code:

    <html>
<head><title></title></head>
<body></body>
</html>

  3. Save this as nwtab.html in the whitebg folder.

  4. Make a new text file and paste this:

    { "name": "White BG", "description": "Bleaches New Tab's Background, Including Incognito's", "version": "0.1", "incognito": "split", "chrome_url_overrides": { "newtab": "nwtab.html" }, "manifest_version": 2
}
    1. Save this as manifest.json in the whitebg folder.
    2. Now switch to Chrome and open the Extensions page: chrome://extensions/
    3. From the top of the page, tick Developer mode.
    4. Click the button Load unpacked extension..., and choose the folder whitebg.
    5. A new extension should appear as White BG.
    6. Finally, under our new extension, tick its Allow in incognito.
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It might be possible to patch chrome.dll, but would still have the incognito welcome text somewhere in there.

There is an easier way, inspecting with developer tools we can see that the styling comes from incognito_new_tab_theme.css.

This file is plain-text packed/concatenated in resources.pak, so we can edit it with a simple text editor (Notepad++).

  1. Find background-color (careful, make sure you found the right one, there are a few similar ones):

    html { background-attachment: fixed; background-color: $i18n{colorBackground}; background-position: $i18n{backgroundBarDetached}; background-repeat: $i18n{backgroundTiling}; height: 100%; overflow: auto;
}

    Replace the background-color value, however to not break the offset headers of the .pak file, make sure to use same number of chars:

    background-color: white;/***************/

  2. Find welcome box:

    /** Typography -------------------------------------------------------------- */
\n
.content { /* This is identical to the default background color. It's necessary to set it for the case when a theme with a background image is installed. */ background-color: #303030; color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7);
....

    I just replaced the background-color with display: none to completely hide it:

    display: none;/**********/
1

You can follow the guide here, fixed it. and yes very annoying.

You should go to chrome://flags/find the Material Design in the browser’s top Chrome flag, and check the Non-Material option under it.

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