Chrome OS is picking up a built-in Night Mode, here’s how to access it now

Night mode is an excellent feature for mobile phones, but it first rose to popularity on the computer, with useful apps such as f.lux. Most platforms have an option to activate this in one way or another, but Chrome OS unfortunately never has — until now, as Google is bringing a built-in night mode to the operating system.

As discovered by some eagle-eyed users on Reddit, Chrome OS currently has an official, native night mode baked right into the settings menu. Like on other platforms, Chrome OS’ night mode reduces the amount of blue light emitted by the display by overlaying a tint. In the case of Chrome OS, it’s a yellowish tint rather than a red as seen on some other devices.

It’s not 100% effective, but it certainly makes a big difference in the late hours of the day, as removing blue light makes it easier for you to fall asleep. Of course, you won’t want to use this mode while doing any tasks that require accurate colors, but for the most part, the tinted view is a worthwhile tradeoff.

Currently, this feature is not available in the Chrome OS stable channel, so you’ll need to go to the canary channel to enable it. To do that, follow the steps below. Do keep in mind, though, that this is a pretty involved process that will reset your machine and will result in an unstable experience.

The first step is to enable developer mode. On most Chromebooks, doing so requires pressing Esc + Refresh (F5) + Power. After that, the screen should go blank followed by a warning screen. When this shows, press Ctrl + D and you should then proceed to switch to developer mode.

Note: Once developer mode has been enabled, you will need to press Ctrl + D on boot to skip the verification screen.

The next step is to switch to the canary channel. To do this, press Ctrl + Alt + T to open a command prompt. From here type shell to get a prompt and then enter sudo su to attain root access. Last, enter the following command to switch to the canary channel.

update_engine_client –channel=canary-channel –update

Once completed, you should boot into the canary channel of Chrome OS. Again, this is a very unstable build of the OS, so expect a lot of bugs. Once in this version, though, you can activate night mode by simply pressing the toggle which appears in the settings panel.