Stepan and I sat together today, trying changing the variables to make the omnibox appear lighter. 

Simply put, whenever we made the appear omnibox lighter, it would also decrease the contrast between the omnibox and the rest of the toolbar. 

We found a solution that works well on white backgrounds, but not so well on dark backgrounds. I tend to prioritize white backgrounds, since it makes up for most of the web, as well as the Fakebox, but I'm not sure if we should ship this with lower accessibility on darker backgrounds. 

Our proposal:
Omnibox Pill - From 100% Black with alpha of 0.09 to 85% Black with alpha of 0.09. 

What I think we should do is not rush this change because of the Birthday marketing material. I think it would be fine to use a lighter shade of grey for marketing purposes, so it stands out less compared to the other platforms. 

I'm marking as M70 and assigning to Pete to make final call when he is back. 

See the attachments 
NTP: Left Canary, Right Proposed

Deleted: NTP.png 902 KB

	NTP.png 902 KB View Download

Deleted: Artboard Copy.png 71.8 KB

	Artboard Copy.png 71.8 KB View Download

I agree with holding off until pschaffner is back to make a call on this. 


Adding lpalmaro@ in case she sees an issue with the contrast between the omnibox and background in your proposal.

+1

Thanks for looking into this guys! 

What could also be interesting for future iterations is to see if we can mimic the GM2 grey values more so that it's not using 100% black (it has a noticeably bluer tone especially when side by side).

Also, for posterity, in a small user study, we found that users with little mobile browsing experience said that the url was tappable even without an omnibox, so it might be okay to make it slightly less visible in some states.

Thanks again for looking into this!

Thanks Hannah! 

I think it would be interesting to try the more blueish grey, although it isn't necessary consistent with iOS. 

Thanks for sharing your user insight. Will talk to Pete when he's back! 

Let's address this please this week. 

Hannah/Martijn/Pete: What would you like the colors to be? If we'll make changes in M70, this has to be done asap. Branch is tomorrow. Thanks.

I think Pete should have a look at this and decide if this critical for M70, I'm guessing he wouldn't mind aiming for M71. 

If this is simple enough I prefer to address this in M70. I pinged it 10 days ago :). I don’t mind leaving things as-is. Your call really. 

Removing milestone. This is not simple given our use of uivisualeffect views, and really isn't critical for marketing purposes (why this bug was originally opened). We can just update mocks for marketing, and the discrepancy in grey is not going to negatively effect usability nor be perceptible for those switching between Chrome clients so I see no need to rush it in 70.