Desaturate Favicons icon

Desaturate Favicons

by Adam Schwartz

v0.5 Updated May 28, 2024 25.83KiB
CWS
1K
Users
★ 4.06
18 reviews
#17873
of 201.2K
functionality
#514 of 7.5K
⚠️Not updated in over a year

Description

Favicons—originally “favorites icons”—are the small icons that appear next to the page title inside a tab in Google Chrome. Many companies choose to utilize this icon as a way to show off their logo or brand. As such, they’re often colorful and bold. In an effort to provide a more minimalist, distraction-free, browsing experience, this extension desaturates the tab icons for all but the active tab. In other words, all of the background tabs will appear in grayscale (“black and white”). When you switch which tab you’re viewing, the tab you were just viewing will see its icon switch to grayscale, and the new one you’re viewing will go back to full color. The extension has no settings. There’s nothing to do. Just install it and it’ll start working right away. If you ever want the full color of icons to return, simply uninstall the extension.
Desaturate Favicons screenshot 1

Reviews (5 cached)

★☆☆☆☆2025-09-10
Marita Sørlie

Doesn't desaturate any tabs.

★☆☆☆☆2018-03-05
Jaymie Gonzo

Doesn't seem to work whatsoever.

★★☆☆☆2023-04-14
Przemyslaw Pokorski

Sure, it desatured some favicons. It doesn't seem to care what is active though (might be due to Chrome updates since?) and some icons won't desaturate at all (e.g. Google)

★★★☆☆2020-01-31
Rafal Zelazo

Works on out of focus tabs as advertised but there's a problem at the moment. For me personally the difference is not flagrant enough to warrant installing the extensions though. Maybe if the icons were also lighter? (or more transparent, idk, cause lighter favicons would not work on dark themes) The big issue is that it also desaturates favicons in the bookmarks!

★★★☆☆2018-11-30
Mehul Gupta

Works most of the time, only problem is when you have tabs of the same icon or similar domain address. I don't know if it's even possible to fix that. The other problem is that is stopped working for my google docs after sometime; so I suppose its best for shorter session. Perhaps it could be because of an extension conflict. Request, can you please make a half saturate mode? Some of my icons must be shown outside of B &W as I do color sensitive work.

Permissions (1)

Permissions

favicon

Details

Version 0.5
Updated May 28, 2024
Size 25.83KiB
First Seen Mar 31, 2026