ChromeOS may be about to give us the time of day. Well, rather, more times of day with which to feature different wallpapers. It all began with the long-awaited, much-anticipated debut of automatic dark and light mode cycling last year which allowed not only the GUI to change colors based on the time of day, but also changed the wallpaper as well. But there soon could be more opportunities for users to change their wallpapers without having to lift a finger.

According to recently-merged commits in the Chromium Gerrit (via 9to5Google), ChromeOS will not only change wallpapers when it switches from light to dark or vice versa.

There will be new wallpaper "modes" for the "morning" and in "late afternoon" that can be set based on some new scheduling logic that goes beyond accounting for just the local sunrise and sunset times. These new periods are intended to cover the first and last thirds of available daylight in any given day, respectively. Presumably, the regular light mode wallpaper slots in during the middle third.

New feature flags also indicate "Time of Day" dependence for both wallpapers (#time-of-day-wallpaper) as well as screen savers (#time-of-day-screen-saver, which requires the first flag to be enabled). Speaking of, videos are also expected to join the existing options for screen savers with Google providing two clips that sound quite time lapse-y to us: one's titled "Clouds," the other "New Mexico."

Most of the work for these changes looks to be complete, so there's a chance they may come under Chrome 113's feature freeze on March 9 — ChromeOS's stable rollout is set for May 4.