I often use the reader mode in Firefox. Although it is not the same as a dark mode for a whole webpage, it is pretty good at removing clutter and making a web text easier to read. With the added bonus that there are no permissions involved (although I suspect the latter are absolutely necessary for the addon to work, without sharing data to 3rd parties).

It is even possible to save a bookmark in Firefox with reader mode already enabled, by adding about:reader?url= before the url.

I tried this a few months back, I liked the visual effect and the configuration flexibility, but it ate at my CPU waaay too much. Anybody else have this? Was meaning to look for a lightweight alternative. Maybe I'll try this extension again to see if it's still a resource hog.

Note: I'm on Firefox.

On Firefox, I love the Owl - Dark Background app.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/owl

Does anyone actually prefer reading text on a bright background? If so, what are your reasons? For me, the choice is obvious to the point that I'm often annoyed at the lengths I need to go to in order to browse the web comfortably. I feel like we should have moved to the sane default of dark-themed UI ages ago.

I'm almost blind (legally), and this is the first extension I found that PERFECTLY fixes the contrast so I don't need 20-point font zoom to be able to read it. I have tried dozens of FF extensions to adjust contrast, dark theme, etc... none have worked this well.

I wonder if the creator is a fan of

https://contrastrebellion.com/

It Just Works!

I'm buying this tonight. Thank-you very much.

I've been using this for a few weeks and overall I'm happy with it. I do find that some complex web apps like gmaps or gmail slow down with this extension enabled. Particularly so in Firefox.

I use it daily in conjunction with f.lux and its been an essential combination for a smooth transition to late-night working/surfing/reading.

Specifically, after trying similar extensions, this one is the best. Its css rules fit perfectly for most of the websites which I visit.

I've never bought anything so fast. $7 for the safari extension sounds like a lot, but for how much time I spend on the web and how glaringly white most pages are when OS X has done a good job with Dark Mode, it's well worth the price.

I’ve also written a similar addon, although much simpler, using static css filters:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-mode-night-re...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-mode-nig...

https://gitlab.com/o9000/darken

It has 4 presets that can be configured per domain.

I’ve added by hand rules to fix inverted images on some popular websites. YouTube is a pain to maintain, they keep changing their css every couple of months.

The code is simple enough to review even for someone not familiar with JS. And you can download it and load it as a local extension if you’re worried about the permission.

I’ve only tested it under Linux, I don’t use anything else. But some users tell me it works under Windows too.

Dark Background and Light Text is great also ...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-backgrou...

Fully customizable so you can don't have to go full black/white, you can copy and dark theme you like and use that as a default.

An extension that's become as important to me as uBO. Discovered this only a couple of months ago thanks to a random comment from someone here on HN. I'd previously been using another extension that did the same thing, but poorly.

HN now looks like an old school amber monitor, and its default rules get 9 out of 10 sites spot on, with perfect contrast. Unlike other similar addons seems able to leave the right highlight and banner colours alone. If some rare site doesn't work well with the defaults you can tune individually or even add custom css for that site only. The few times I browse without it my middle-aged eyes are instantly resenting the excessive whiteness.

So I have to thank you, a lot, for your attention to detail with this. I hope you receive lots and lots of donations. :)

The only negative I find is it's sometimes very greedy with CPU, especially if you're switching between a few tabs a lot.

I'm a big fan of dark mode, particularly because I was of the impression that it was easier on the eyes.

Turns our, it's not so black and white...

In a study from the 1980s: > However, most studies have shown that dark characters on a light background are superior to light characters on a dark background (when the refresh rate is fairly high). For example, Bauer and Cavonius (1980) found that participants were 26% more accurate in reading text when they read it with dark characters on a light background. Reference: Bauer, D., & Cavonius, C., R. (1980)

So perhaps dark mode actually puts more strain on the eyes? At least when the user is not in a dark room.

Very interested to hear about similar research done in this area.

Further reading here: https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/53268/22606

How can I trust that this extension, which has access to every page I visit, doesn't steal my data? How can I trust that if someone else takes over the project and releases an update, that my data is still secure?

Looks great, but I'm just so skeptical of browser extensions now.

This app is a godsend for people with eye floaters.

The results are really impressive, but any large page is very noticeably slower to load.

I have used this extension for the past few months, and I couldn't be more pleased, it takes a huge strain away from my eyes. Highly recommend! And thanks to the author (cheers)

I use this extension on both Firefox and Chrome. I sometimes disable it on some sites just because I'm too used to their original design like Google, but it works nicely on a number of sites. We needed something to override the color scheme of an internal instance of Confluence / BitBucket and I found this plugin and it worked out well, at least 2 other team members use it after I suggested it.

This looks to have a more polished GUI than Dark Background and Light Text (on Firefox, particularly on mobile), but I'm not sure it offers the same flexibility of multiple ways to achieve color changes. I've run into a few sites where one method didn't work well but another did and having all that built in is handy.

Really awesome extension. I am just waiting for the developer to fix Dark Reader breaking sVim link hinting on Safari. It makes link hints unreadable and thus I can't use the extension yet although I really wish I could.

A hotkey to turn on/off the dark mode is also coming soon and with that the extension will be perfect.

I'd love to have the dark theming off by default, and enable it on a per-site basis. I prefer black-on-white, but there are some sites that benefit from being the other way around. Currently, I have to basically disable theming for every website except the ones I want darkened, which is a bit inefficient, or turn the extension off completely.

Also, since Safari users have to pay for the app, I wonder if it's possible to add some Safari-specific features. I'd really love iCloud sync to keep my custom site theme settings across my Macs. I'm not actually sure to what extent this is possible with apps that provide extensions to Safari, but some minor value-add like that could be nice.

This is really neat! Have left it going all day and it’s quite an improvement.

That said, what it’s really done for me is remind me of how much I miss Nocturne: https://github.com/strider72/blacktree-nocturne (but originally from Blacktree, the original publisher of Quicksilver). Even the Github version linked there is long abandoned, so hard to try on for yourself—but the monochrome inverted night mode was far and away the best late night coding environment I’ve tested my eyes on.

How long will it likely be until the automatic dark mode toggling is available in Chrome/Firefox? I'm not a fan of Safari.

Does it require Chrome and Firefox to implement prefers-color-scheme first?

This extension so far is neat to try with the day to day sites I visit.

The security settings do seem to be concerning, but I'm not sure if it's due to how much Firefox, Safari and Chrome have locked down their worlds.

Edit: One unintended side effect is copying and pasting text into an email (like an address from a google search) copies the text with a black background. I could do a plaintext copy, but it would be nice if text was copied in the original formatting if possible.

1994: trust the browser for presentation

1997: geez the browser makes some dull or terrible decisions about presentation and we want to control our site's presentation

2005: OK but semantic web and CSS tho'

2013: JavaScript all the things!

2015: whoever thought the semantic web was a decent idea, the browser is THE VM, CSS is teh sux0rs, when can I just treat it like a compile target like every other kind of development

2018: oh hai what if we invented some way to let users control how they see the content of a website

Since there's quite a few of these dark mode extensions with very variable features and compatibility/robustness, I feel like there's space for a comparison chart type thing. With side by side screenshots of how they handle certain websites and how they influence performance (that might be tricky). If someone want's to steal that idea go ahead, otherwise I might whip something up somewhere over the next weeks.

Honest question: how well-lit is the area you use your computer in, and have you tried turning down your monitor's brightness? I'm as baffled by the popularity of dark themes as you are with light themes, but I'm sitting in a fairly bright room with natural light and a monitor at 35% brightness. In these conditions dark-on-light and light-on-dark text are equally pleasant to read, and I opt for light themes when given the choice simply for consistency. If you're using dark themes because you browse the web in the dark, it seems to me like changing your conditions is a better solution for your eye health.

Yes. I find it really difficult and uncomfortable to read bright text on dark backgrounds. It honestly hurts my eyes. And afterwards my eyes have leftover streaks of bright after the text lines. Can't stand it, and I will go to lengths to turns such pages into "bright mode".

Absolutely. I am old enough to remember working on monochrome monitors with green or yellow text on a black background, and the associated eyestrain was torture for me. It was a glorious day when I installed my first color monitor and was finally able to read black text on a white background.

I do. I cannot use dark themed text editors for a long time even though I fully understand and feel that over time it becomes tiring to the eye. I can't explain the reasons why I keep using the white background because I don't exactly know, but I think I find it a bit difficult to keep my focus on what I'm reading (or writing). Feels like I'm getting lost in the code that I'm editing, can find the relevant part as quickly as I can with a bright background. Maybe it has something to do with habit, which can change upon forcing myself, I don't know.

Yes, and I understand there's a simple physiological reason for it. To focus, the eye needs to contract the pupil (which is why when people take off their glasses they squint at things. Another test if shortsighted: remove specs and look at a distant item such as a clock on a wall. It looks blurry. Take a sheet of paper, put a pin through it and then look again at the clock through the pinhole - it's a lot less fuzzy). With dark background, the eye tries to expand the pupil to let in more light, yet wants to contract to improve focus, so they fight. With light background, they don't fight.

This is sloppy but I believe correct. Any experts, feel free to correct or extend this, thanks.

When I stated using a mac, the bright background infuriated me, but when I went back to a dark background, I realised the mac was just nicer to use.

To the guy saying it's a strain to use black text on white, I believe some eye disorders make it easier to read white text on black. Another reason is the brightness of the monitor is just excessive - try turning it down.

HTH

I find dark modes depressing when I stare at them for too long.

Take the new macOS dark mode. Looked great when I first switched to it, but after a few hours I happily switched back to light mode.

I also only really read/code at day/in well-lit environments, so dark mode doesn't really do anything for me when it comes to eye strain etc.

It really depends on how light it is outside. I like light backgrounds when it's light outside, but dark ones at night.

White backgrounds have less glare with my monitors, and I'm not one to work without a lamp as I live off a legal pad. I haven't gotten eye strain in over a decade since I started using f.lux. I used to be really into night mode in high school, but that didn't really last as back then, extensions like this were clunky and screwed up websites (eg, not all black font would switch to white, or the implementation would just invert the colors on the page, including images).

There's an IT 'dungeon' at my workplace, and all of their screens are in a dark mode theme although the IT people there do not use any lights in that room besides the glow of their monitors, and maybe 10 feet of multicolored string lights in one of the corners so you aren't running into desks. They even have blackout curtains over the windows. The first time I walked into that room trying to find someone, I assumed it was empty, lights off, and everyone went home, but there were a dozen people in there working like that! I'd feel like I crawled out of a cave every time I left the room if I worked in that environment. Good lighting keeps me awake as well.

I actually switch depending on the lighting conditions around me. If I'm on the train on my laptop during the day, it's too bright to read text on a black background. Everything becomes way too difficult to read, so I set all my terminals/editors to white. Once I'm somewhere darker or it's later in the day, I'll switch everything back.

I find it jarring to switch from a dark window to something bright, for example from vim to the web browser.

You basically said it yourself. It takes a lot of effort to make everything dark. Instead I make bright comfortable. Around 5% brightness on the external monitor and f.lux active all the time with a pleasant middle setting.

i do

bright text on a dark background (at least on a display) triggers auras and nausea for me. the auras can vary a bit, but a typical one would be seeing an overlay of flickering, scrolling dark-colored horizontal bars for the next few minutes

i actually came to this thread to see if the extension supported "Light mode for everything" as an option :)

I prefer a dark theme, but find black on white much better outdoors or in an overlit area. This is on a work laptop with a glossy screen (I'd prefer matte).

I prefer dark themes, but they become more difficult to read than light themes when there's glare. If there's a lot of ambient light, dark themes could even cause eyestrain.

You can turn up monitor brightness to compensate, but you could have turned down monitor brightness to compensate for the light theme anyway.

Also, if you're using a projector, dark modes tend to be noticably more difficult to read. I'm not sure why that is.

Honestly, though, I stick with Microsoft's dark mode 95% of the time.

I do!

Because if the background is uniformly bright (white/whitish) I can use the accessibility options to invert the display and make everything dark :-)

I hate Windows 10 full black taskbar (must be #000000), because it breaks this. And even W10 lets you pick some colors in a theme, you can't go full white (#ffffff).

I do, because the screens on my devices suffer from extreme amounts of glare if they're not as white/bright as I can get them to be, and I work in suboptimal lighting conditions.

dark mode makes me sleepy, having bright monitors and room helps me stay alert, so does standing which gets tiresome from doing it all day.

I work from home so there are less distractions and it helps me stay focused for this... but all in all I think this is 100% pure preference, I cannot work in dark lit rooms, when I am working at 3am (this is rare but happens) I have my hospital grade lighting (my wifes words) blasting at on :-)

in other news, I think its relevant for me to say my HN topcolor is ffffff :-)

I still remember when I went from using MS-DOS to Windows 3.1. The black background of MS-DOS was pleasing, whereas Windows was too bright on the eyes.

In dark environments, dark UIs are easy on the eyes.

In light environments, dark UIs get washed out and are illegible.

It depends on ambient light.

Anecdotally, I very much doubt dark mode puts more strain on the eyes at night time.

During the day, I could see the "light mode" being preferable. But at night the brightness of devices seems quite damaging to eyesight and sleep.

If you have dim lighting, you can cause eye strain, and in extreme cases actual eye damage, by having small points of bright light in your vision like a phone or computer monitor because your pupils will be more relaxed.

Even now with the benefits of warmer color temperatures becoming mainstream knowledge, most people still use blindingly bright screens with high color temperatures, which causes more eye strain.

Also when you're staring at a monitor for 8-12 hours a day, it becomes less about readability and more about comfort. That's why most programmers prefer dark themes.

There's so many mixed signals and contradictory studies about eye strain and computer displays that I'm almost forced to conclude as a layman that it's totally subjective and up to the user. I've read about blogs and apps which go with a light design to reduce user strain due to being very text-centric, but then again there's studies that say programming benefits from a dark view for the exact same reason.

I've read about apps that switched from light to dark and saw a drop in engagement, but the same thing has happened for apps that go from dark to light, so perhaps it's just poor experimental control and the dip is just what happens to the user base whenever you change up the UI at all. There's always a backlash against that.

The studies are never very rigorous, either. There's also lots of persistent myths and misconceptions left over from yesteryear, such as the myth that being close to a CRT will actually damage your eyesight. I think that's conflated with dark-vs-light because of the typical retro image of a CRT displaying a green-on-black CLI. Seems that some people think reading strain means real eye damage, perhaps even permanent damage, instead of what it really means--quicker exhaustion and perhaps a headache.

The light UI has really won out completely in the wider world of consumer UI, while the dark UI is almost ubiquitous in certain niches and communities. People are always asking for or writing blog posts about the ultimate answer. I think it should just be up to the individual: what do you prefer? And UI design should move towards standards to support this user-based decision, offering both a light and dark mode that is easily toggled based on personal preferences and the ambient lighting where the UI currently exists.

This is 1980 in a time before OLED screens

If you prefer dark text on dimmed background try Dark Reader's light (dimmed) mode https://i.imgur.com/H38tpIS.png

Firefox add-ons pass full source code review before the submission after the Stylish incident. Safari extensions also pass manual review, Apple asks developer to send an ID card photo. Not sure about Chrome, you have to simply trust me, the code is not obfuscated and you can always locate the files and see what the extension does in your browser. Google recently announced some security changes https://blog.chromium.org/2018/10/trustworthy-chrome-extensi...

To his credit, the author has released the source for the Chrome and Firefox versions:

https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader

However, I posed the same question in the MAS about the closed-source Safari version, which requires full access to webpage contents ("Can read sensitive information from webpages, including passwords, phone numbers, and credit cards on all webpages") and browsing history ("Can see when you visit all webpages").

The author's response boiled down to "trust me" and "trust Apple's review process".

Shortly after mentioning recent headlines highlighting weaknesses in Apple's review process ("More malicious apps found in Mac App Store that are stealing user data" https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/09/07/more-malicious-ap... , "Mac App Store apps are stealing user data" https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2018/09/mac-ap... , etc), Apple deleted the review, but a cached version can be found here: http://www.gadgeteur.com/2018/11/26/dark-reader-for-safari-a... and here: https://pastebin.com/DxsWcaj7 .

EDIT: Other than the permissions issue (which was unfortunately a show-stopper for me), I was very pleased with the Safari extension's functionality; it could be a good fit for those who restrict their web browsing to non-sensitive sites or who can remember to disable it when necessary.

Install the extension (in a throwaway Chrome profile), review the code, then repackage it (small modifications needed to package.json) and install it in developer mode. And/or put it up as a repo if you wish (and license allows it).

That's a valid concern. Certainly an easy way to Target an audience to get at a rich set of data. But who's to say Chromium isn't doing this already anyway?