Read Messages Without Blue Tick
As long as you have those blue tick marks enabled, people can see the exact time you read their WhatsApp text. You can switch off read receipts on your phone if you want to disable this, but there’s a cool WhatsApp Web trick to get around this.
If you are talking with someone on WhatsApp and want to read their messages without them getting a read receipt, here’s what you can do:
- Open the chat in your WhatsApp Web window.
- Open another program window and change its size so that you can see the full WhatsApp Web chat in the background (or place them side by side).
- Click in the new window and keep your cursor there. This is the critical step, as the computer thinks you are working in a different window.
- Messages will load in the WhatsApp chat window, which you can see, without being marked as read with the blue ticks. Right now, they will be double gray ticks. This means that you have received the message, but not read it.
- When you’re happy with marking them as read, click the WhatsApp Web chat window and those ticks will instantly turn blue.
The limitation of this method is that you can only read the content of one chat at a time. But to be honest, how often will you really need to use this WhatsApp Web trick anyway?
Get WAToolkit Extension for Message Previews
In WAToolkit, Chrome users have an great extension to add extra features to WhatsApp Web. It adds two cool tricks to built-in WhatsApp number features, including one that lets you again read over conversations without triggering the read receipt.
- Background notifications: When you get a new message in WhatsApp, you no longer need to switch to the WhatsApp Web tab to read it. The WAToolkit icon’s badge shows how many unread messages you have. Hover over the icon and you’ll be able to preview the messages, without registering them as having been read in your main chat.
- Full-width chat bubbles: By default, WhatsApp doesn’t stretch a person’s chat bubble across the full width of the chat window. That’s why you get multi-line texts when it would easily fit in a single line of your wide desktop window. WAToolkit fixes this by changing the text bubbles to full-width.
Enable Dark Mode for WhatsApp Web
For a long time, WhatsApp Web’s dark mode was a secret feature that wasn’t publicly launched. You had to fiddle B to B Database with browser coding to enable it. But that’s no longer the case; dark mode is now available within Settings. To enable it:
- Click the three vertical dots to open the menu.
- Click Settings.
- Click Theme.
- Select Dark.
- Click OK.
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