chromium-patches

My custom Chromium patches, including:

Extension-less startpage that maintains its address bar focus.
Dynamic GTK dark mode for Linux distros with a Night/Day theme

PKGBUILD is of ungoogled-chromium although these patches can be applied to any Chromium build.

Custom Startpage

Problem: Google Chrome (Chromium pictured here) requires you to install an extension to change your new tab page. This would be fine, except that new tab loses focus of the searchbar! It also loads far slower than it should.

Solution: Build Chromium with all instances of chrome://newtab replaced with your custom startpage URL. This patch does the replacement, and also adds some checks to ensure the URL is hidden and the searchbar keeps its focus. :smiley:

GTK Dark Theme

As of August 2022 this still works.

Problem: Chromium does not update prefers-color-scheme when the GTK OS theme is changed. It’s a long-lived bug in Chromium. Here is the bugreport and Electron issue:

Workaround: This minor patch calls an update on the internal Web and NativeUI colors when the OS theme is changed.

Gnome 42 Note

This patch correctly handles dark/light theme switching on GTK’s theme variants. As of Gnome 42 this is now a legacy feature.

This patch does not work with Gnome 42’s “Dark Style Preference”. You must switch themes. Firefox handles this new feature correctly. I would appreciate help implementing it here.

At the time of writing, the “legacy” feature is still a valid way to switch between light and dark desktop themes. I switch Adawita/Adawita Dark with this extension for example.