It’s clear that Microsoft is fully committed to improving Chromium-based Edge browser and multiple enhancements are already underway. Many of the improvements will come to all Chromium-powered browsers, including Chrome.
After adding an improved version of Find box to Chromium, Microsoft is now working on two new features – Aura tooltips and contrast colours based on NativeTheme by default.
According to a commit by a Microsoft engineer, the company looks to improve dark mode implementation in Chromium web browsers with Aura tooltips. At the moment, when you hover a link in Chrome or Edge, the tooltip (text preview of the links or options) doesn’t respect the browser’s dark mode.
The tooltip preview is always light coloured and it doesn’t match the rest of the UI. In the comments of bug posts, Microsoft noted that it also discovered that when you change the text scaling via Settings > Ease of Access > Display > “Make text bigger” slider, the tooltip text does not get any bigger.
The tooltip’s dark mode incompatible issue and accessibility problems could be addressed by turning on Windows’ Aura tooltip by default.
An early version of Aura tooltip has been already enabled by default in Chrome Canary, but the feature is currently rendering the text previews in weird black background.
Contrast colours to respect Windows 10’s settings
As per another commit, Microsoft is working a “Forced colors mode” to apply the user’s OS forced colours theme to more compatible web content. If you turn on high contrast mode on your Windows 10 device, the supported web contents in Chrome will soon respect the setting and render the webpage in high contrast.
In a Github post, Microsoft revealed that the feature is already supported on classic Edge browser.
“Pass the state of high contrast from NativeTheme to the renderer and update the forced colors enum based on its value dynamically. This is used to evaluate the forced-colors media query,” the commit reads.
“This change also removes the use of DarkModeObserver in WebContentsImpl and NativeTheme in preference to NativeThemeObserver. WebContentsImpl and NativeTheme now implement NativeThemeObserver to track changes to both dark mode and high contrast,” Microsoft explains how this feature works.
Find box
As mentioned, Microsoft is testing improvements for Find box in Chromium and one of the change will allow Find box to pick up the selected text.
