A new flag is now available in Edge Canary

Jul 3, 2019 12:03 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has decided to migrate to the Chromium engine for the Microsoft Edge browser, and as part of the transition, the software giant became one of the biggest contributors to the development of this technology.

As a result, the company proposes improvements that could end up being implemented not only in Microsoft Edge, but also in other Chromium-based browser, such as Google Chrome itself.

One of the most recent features that the company is working on is better support for the dark mode.

The Chromium-based Microsoft Edge already comes with a dark theme, but there are parts of the browser UI that are yet to embrace this visual style. And one of them is tooltips.

Microsoft believes that it can resolve the problem of tooltips using the standard theme by implementing a technology already available on Windows 10 and which the majority of UWP apps rely on. Called Aura, this mode makes it possible to switch the tooltips to a dark mode as well in the browser.

The company has already started testing the black tooltips in Microsoft Edge, and users themselves can give them a try with a dedicated flag in the Canary build.

First and foremost, you need to update to the latest Canary version of Microsoft Edge browser. This tutorial is based on Microsoft Edge Canary version 77.0.208.0.

Microsoft Edge Canary for Windows 10

Launch the browser and in the address bar type the following command to launch the advanced flags configuration screen:


edge://flags
Using the search box at the top, look for this flag in the same screen:
Enable aura tooltips on Windows
The one-step method that doesn’t involve you searching for the flag comes down to simply copying and pasting the code below in the address bar of Microsoft Edge Canary:
edge://flags/#enable-aura-tooltips-on-windows
The default setting of this flag is disabled, so you need to use the drop-down menu next to it in order to switch it to Enabled. Doing this will require a browser reboot to save your settings.

The next time you launch your browser, the tooltips that show up when navigating the web should now use a dark mode, just like UWP apps do across Windows 10 when the dark visual style is enabled.

Black tooltip in Microsoft Edge Canary for Windows 10

Microsoft explains the challenges of implementing a dark mode for tooltips in Windows in this commit:

“The native Windows tooltip doesn't support dark theme and it has some accessibility issues with the text scaling settings. By using the aura tooltips we can solve both of these problems together.

This change completely enables Windows to use TooltipAura, behind a Feature flag. Included in this change is an increase to the maximum width of tooltips from 400px to 800px in order to better match the native tooltip and avoid some of the early truncation issues described by https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=292738 (which ChromeOS currently suffers from).”

Google Chrome will also come with aura tooltips enabled by default in the Windows version of the browser. Google has already made this change in Chrome Canary, and it is expected to activate this option in the stable build of Google Chrome in the upcoming updates.

Meanwhile, Microsoft keeps refining the experience in Edge, so we can only hope that similar improvements would be released on macOS as well. By migrating to Chromium, Microsoft can release Microsoft Edge on non-Windows platforms as well, including here macOS. The existing preview builds of the browser, namely the Canary and Dev versions, can already be downloaded on both Windows and macOS, with a Linux version not yet confirmed by expected to land at some point in the future.

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Microsoft Edge Canary for Windows 10
Microsoft Edge Canary for Windows 10Black tooltip in Microsoft Edge Canary for Windows 10
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