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Background: I love Chrome, and I love using it for reading the news. However I prefer a lower contrast reading background. When you highlight all the text on a web page, the background goes blue, and the text goes white. This is okay if I need to know it's highlighted but not pleasant for reading. However, if you click in the address bar while the text is highlighted, you get this great black on grey effect which is perfect for me. However, when in that mode, you can't use the keypad to navigate the page, you can only scroll.

So here's my question: How can I change the default highlight in Chrome color from blue to grey?

I posted this on the Chrome dev site years ago but nobody ever answered it, and I gave up (even deleted the link... bit of malaise I guess). I have just discovered superuser, and I bet someone here is up to the task.

Wiser2k1
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6 Answers6

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There is now a new and more easy to use chrome extension that does this. Its called Custom Highlight and you can install it here.

Andreto
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2

If you're on a mac, you can change the system highlight color, which will change the color of the highlighting in chrome.

System Preferences > General > Highlight Color

Kyle Chadha
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2

There's also this Chrome extension called Highlight Color which does exactly that

And actually looks pretty neat from what I can see from the screenshots.

Bloke
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If you want to change ALL colors to improve readability, and not necessary be able to choose what exact color to change to, then I've found that FreshEyes (source code here) is the only truly universal color changer, as it changes not only the text and highlighting color of selected text, but also of highlighted results by quick find / live search (when pressing ctrl + F to find a text on the web page).

When you activate this extension, make sure to disable other color changers as these may overwrite and revert the changes that FreshEyes does (so at first I thought it didn't work, until I disabled the other extensions I was testing).

gaborous
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An alternative is to use Dark Reader, an open-source extension to make all websites under dark mode, but the dark mode can be disabled so you can also use it just as a website CSS restyler. There is an optional new design that can be enabled to allow changing text highlighting color easily, this works with the latest Chrome version (114.0.5735.199) and it should also work on Mozilla Firefox, otherwise you can also make a CSS rule to have more granularity in how you change your text highlighting.

gaborous
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I doubt it can be done with a vanilla version of the latest releases of Chrome per this response to a similar question about user stylesheets. You could use a plugin like Stylish. You could then look for a good premade stylesheet or you could make your own.

(The article above says that this isn't supported in Chrome. Ignore that, it works now.)

Community
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krowe
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