How To Enable Chrome’s Hidden Dark Mode And Secure Password Features

Chrome 78 is here. With luck, your browser should have already updated by now to the brand-new version, which comes with bug fixes, security patches, and speedier, hovering boxes when you move your mouse over tabs. There are also two fun features buried within Chrome 78 that requires a bit of digging to enable.

How to enable Password Leak Detection in Chrome 78

This feature, as its name implies, will notify you if any of the logins you’ve previously saved in Chrome have turned up in any kind of data breach. Google will scan any usernames and passwords against its database of breaches—and, yes, this information is hashed so you aren’t just sending your plaintext information back and forth to a Google server somewhere. Password Leak Detection is basically a built-in version of the Password Checkup extension Google previously released, if that helps.

To enable Password Leak Detection in Chrome 78, first make sure you’re running Chrome 78 by clicking on the triple-dot icon in the upper-right corner of your browser, hovering over “Help,” and clicking on “About Google Chrome.” Your browser will check to make sure it’s running the latest version; if not, it’ll download it and prompt you to update.

Once you’re ready, type chrome://flags/#password-leak-detection into your browser address bar, hit Enter, and enable the feature.

How to enable Chrome 78’s “Force Dark Mode”

We’ve talked about this before, so I’ll make this quick. Chrome 78’s “Force Dark Mode” feature allows you to give websites a dark mode that might not otherwise have a style set up for people that prefer a darker look and feel. Instead of being blasted by a bright, white page, Chrome will instead approximate what it thinks a dark theme should look like. So, for Lifehacker, that becomes:

It’s not gorgeous, but it gets the job done if you despise being surprised by bright websites. (Rhymes unintentional.) To turn on Force Dark Mode, simply enter chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark in your address bar, hit Enter, and turn the feature on.

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