A new Chromium code commit shows that Google hasn’t given up on its plans to add Windows 11 Mica design to Chrome, but we don’t know when it’ll begin rolling out to everyone.
Mica design itself isn’t new. It was first introduced with Windows 11 in 2021, and it has slowly expanded to popular native and third-party apps, such as Firefox (Nightly). But more popular options like Google Chrome still don’t have Mica or other native Windows design features, such as the Acrylic (transparency) effect.
Mica not only looks great when you’ve vivid desktop wallpapers, but it’s also performance-friendly. Unlike other Fluent Design features, Mica captures the desktop wallpaper once and uses it to paint the background of the app’s window. For example, if you use Windows 11 Bloom dark wallpaper, and an app’s window uses Mica, you’ll see a subtle blue tint.
Is Google Chrome finally getting Mica on Windows 11?
Google originally started exploring Mica in Chrome in 2023, and you could enable it by turning on an experimental flag “Windows11-mica-titlebar.” I turned on the flag, and it still works, but what’s holding back Google from respecting Windows 11’s design and turning it on for everyone, or at least making it official?
We don’t know, but Google is identifying new bugs related to Mica ahead of the roll out.
As first spotted by Windows Latest, a Chromium commit confirmed that Chrome’s tabstrip placement in Mica mode depends on the X position of the minimise button. But due to a bug, that number was getting flipped (mirrored/un-mirrored) along different code paths.
This meant that when Mica was turned on, Chrome would display janky tabstrip alignment and the wrong window width.
I’m not going to get into how Google patched the math behind the button placements nd APIs, but the Chromium commit makes it clear that Google didn’t rip Mica out yet. Instead, it’s tightening the Windows frame logic so Mica windows line up perfectly and behave correctly.
“In Mica mode in Windows 11, the frame retrieves the X coordinate of the
minimize button in order to position the tabstrip,” wrote Google’s Dana Fried, who now heads UI for Chrome on Windows.
“This value was being mirrored several times, often different numbers of times based on which code path was hit, and the value that was returned was inconsistent. Recent updates to frame layout logic did not account for this discrepancy,” Google explained.
In 2023, Google changed how Chrome’s Mica mode behaves when the accent colour is applied to the browser’s window. Now, we’ve this particular patch after almost two years of waiting.
