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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.

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  • Here is the Chrome feature request I created for improving this situation: crbug.com/1231644 Please star it and add your use case in the comments. It'll help the developers justify working on this.
    – Ram Rachum
    Commented Oct 12, 2021 at 15:47

6 Answers 6

Reset to default
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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.

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    This is exactly what I've been waiting for! Took me 4 years to find it (I had given up). Thanks!
    – Wiser2k1
    Commented Jul 13, 2019 at 17:30
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    This does not change live search / quick find color (when pressing ctrl + F), which stays yellow
    – gaborous
    Commented Jun 18, 2020 at 21:56
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    @gaborous, I will look into if this is possible. If you want you can create an issue for this on the Custom Highlight GitHub page.
    – Andreto
    Commented Jun 20, 2020 at 6:13
  • @Andreto I did not know the extension was opensource, that's awesome! Kudos for the great work! OK I'll open an issue, and thank you very much for looking into this :-)
    – gaborous
    Commented Jun 23, 2020 at 9:15
  • This still holds now: > This does not change live search / quick find color (when pressing ctrl + F), which stays yellow. Ugly strong yellow!!!!!!!!!!!!
    – Good Pen
    Commented Oct 14, 2022 at 6:29
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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.

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  • This would solve the issue but wow, it requires access to all data about visited websites... a bit too much IMHO
    – ccalboni
    Commented Nov 27, 2017 at 10:25
  • Set background color to #f18458 and (foreground) color to #ffffff then you can get the same selected effect in Firefox Ubuntu.
    – Rick
    Commented May 30, 2019 at 4:10
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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

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  • This doesn't seem to work anymore.
    – Erebus
    Commented May 22, 2019 at 13:34
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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.)

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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).

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    Thanks for the input! 6 years after posting this I still get occasional bites. I've worked around the problem using two extensions: High Contrast, and Custom Highlight
    – Wiser2k1
    Commented Jan 21, 2021 at 17:59
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    Thank you very much for sharing what you use! I'd like to add another contender: Dark Mode. Although meant to be a dark mode theme switcher, it can be styled with CSS however you want. Note however that it's not opensource.
    – gaborous
    Commented Jan 31, 2021 at 4:40
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    Also I'm not sure why my answer was downvoted: FreshEye does change the default blue color of Chrome's text highlighting into another color (to grey or cyan). We just can't specifically set what color we want, we have to choose from various presets that also change the rest of the website's colors, but it does. And it's opensource, so feel free to have a look and make your own plugin to just change the highlighting color.
    – gaborous
    Commented Jan 31, 2021 at 4:42
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    I have discovered Dark Mode and it's great!
    – Wiser2k1
    Commented Sep 16, 2021 at 4:39
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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.

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    Dark Reader looks like a good one. I currently use one called "Dark mode for your browser" which satisfies most situations.
    – Wiser2k1
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 20:04

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