Back in February, it is reported that Google is working on a mysterious Material Design 2 which was spotted in Google’s open source repository for Chrome and Chrome OS. However, Google quickly made the Commit private as soon as the news broke. However, there few changes to the Commit once again and it now appears that the Chrome browser will receive a full-blown redesign during September.
While the earlier references point to a revamped material design, there is not much into it that can help us understand what Google is aiming to achieve. Google even changed the MD2 material design 2 references and replaced with “Touch-Optimized.”Google is internally working on a revamped UI for Google Chrome but hasn’t settled on a name just yet. Google Engineer who is responsible for implementing the UI changes for the Chrome tab and tabstrip accidentally referenced “touch-optimized” design as the mysterious MD2.
Like before, once the reference broke out in the open, the Commit is again made private. According to the various commits that were spotted in the recent times, it looks like Google is said to be revamping Chrome to better optimize for tablets and Windows convertible devices. It’s possible to enable this new UI by going to chrome://flags/#top-chrome-md in the latest builds of Chrome Canary or Chromium and setting it to “touchable.”
This also hints at preparation for a wave of Chrome OS tablets that are now confirmed to launch in the coming days. However, a comment was made on this commit while it was private which states that this touch-optimized revamp of Chrome isn’t MD2, but it does say that the Material Design revamp is “still being designed and won’t look like this in any case.” With September timeframe being far away, we can expect to see a lot of changes being made to Google Chrome’s interface in the coming months.