Themes Come To Chrome

If you like to play dress-up with your browser, Google's got some good news for you. It recently made 30 themes available for its Chrome browser. There's a good reason to skip the themes, though.When it comes to Gmail, I was very happy to see Google offer up some themes to make my inbox look a bit livelier. My current theme is "Graffiti".

Beyond using system-level tools to alter the appearance of your browser, Google recently offered themes to its Chrome browser. The 30 different themes run the gamut from muted to headache-inducing. (OK, I'll admit, some of them are actually pretty nice.)

There's one issue that I noted, as did several other users (notably JKOnTheRun's Kevin Tofel). Using the themes slows down Chrome's speed. The slow-down isn't a serious issue, but it was enough to be noticeable. As Chrome's defining feature is speed, this would appear to be a bit of a conflict.

After changing back to the normal theme, I noticed a slight speed-up in usage. Since speed trumps design (at least for me), I am going to have to stick with the "stock" version of Chrome.

This performance degradation isn't a huge surprise. The same thing can happen to Gmail if you enable the wrong set of Gmail Labs.

Anyway, here are the 30 themes, you can install them pretty much just as you would change the settings in your Gmail.

Enjoy. Or not.