Google Chrome may receive Mica effect for the title bar

As follows from the activity in Chromium's Gerrit service, world's most popular web browser, Google Chrome, may soon receive the Mica-enhanced appearance of the window frame.

Windows 11 incorporates Mica and Acrylic visual effects to enhance the user interface. Mica effect creates a translucent layer on top of UI elements, such as windows, taskbar, and Start menu, adding texture and depth. The intensity of the effect varies based on the desktop's background or wallpaper, resembling frosted glass.

Acrylic, on the other hand, blurs UI elements like context menus, flyouts, and dialogs to provide a sense of depth and focus on the content.

Together, Mica and Acrylic effects boost the visuaTl appeal and immersive experience of the Windows 11 interface.

For obvious reasons, Microsoft Edge was a pioneering web browser to feature Mica in its UI. However, it didn't last long. Developers used to add and remove it several times in pre-release builds of the browser. Last time it was removed from Edge 111 and onward without announcements. The good news here is that Microsoft is finally restoring the Mice effect in Edge.

Mica Effect in Google Chrome

Eagle-eyed Twitter user @Leopeva64, who is well know for his bleeding edge feature findings in Chroimum-based browsers, has spotted a new change list on Gerrit. A piece of code enables the Mica effect for the Chrome's titlebar. It comes with the following description.

Windows 11 22H2 Mica titlebar sample code

This CL demonstrates a minimal set of code changes to enable the Mica Alt titlebar material in Chromium using Windows 11 22H2's new DWMWA_SYSTEMBACKDROP_TYPE DWM attribute.

In addition, there are also samples of how the browser looks with this effect enabled. Take a look.

The second screenshot sports an alternative design of Mica, known as Mica Alt. Mica Alt is a variation of Mica that offers stronger tinting of the user's desktop background color. It can be applied to an app's backdrop to create a more profound visual hierarchy than Mica, particularly when developing an app with a tabbed title bar.

The first patch related to the Mica support in Chrome has already landed in the Chromium code base, so it shouldn't take long for it to reach the builds of the browser. If you a Chrome Canary channel user, you should soon find it working for you.