Material Design 2 is rumored to be hitting Chrome sometime in September, and if the rumors are correct then it’ll be in the beginning of the month, specifically September 2. The details are not so much a confirmation from Google as they are an unintended hint, but according to a comment from a Google employee, Material Design 2, or “MD2” as it was referred to in the commit comments is planned for a “chrome birthday deck” and will include a full-scale redesign of the way the Chrome browser looks. That said there isn’t much detail on how the visual user interface changes will appear to users.
What is known at this point is that it will be a complete revamp, so presumably a lot is changing with the way Chrome looks right now on Desktop, and likely on mobile, though there are no real specific mention of either in this commit. Based on the back and forth messages in the commit, MD2 is still being designed and will look completely different from another Chrome design interface being referred to internally as “touchable Chrome,” which seems to be a smaller set of visual changes that are meant to be for Chrome on desktop devices with a touch interface, perhaps for Chromebooks, as well as convertible devices and tablets. It was also mentioned that changes which are part of touchable Chrome are not the changes for MD2, as it may have been suspected.
Though the MD2 revamp may not happen until September 2, that doesn’t mean there won’t be any changes to the design within Chrome before then, as Google could always make minor incremental changes to the browser leading up to an eventual full-scale revamp that incorporates everything. Should Google plan to do this then it would lighten the load so to speak and give it less to do in regards to implementing visual changes to the design when it plans to do the entire browser. For now Material Design 2 is still very much in the design phase and it will still be quite some time before Google is ready to roll things out.
