It is even possible to save a bookmark in Firefox with reader mode already enabled, by adding about:reader?url= before the url.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...
Note: I'm on Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/night-light-m...
please let us know if it performs better for you! (i'm the author)
Also, I'm not sure why, but the monospace text in the HN reply box is quite unpleasant to read when inverted.
But good effort! Is it open source?
I like it. I was looking for something like that for a while. Nighttime browsing on LED monitors seriously hurts my eyes, even with night light settings on. This looks like it'll do the job. I'll know tonight :)
Not all content is too bright and white. Videos for example playing at full screen, I would not want reduced brightness for. It's the bright 100% white background of websites on a large monitor that is not comfortable.
Also most monitors have annoying UX for adjusting brightness, requiring two presses of tiny unmarked buttons to get to menu then change brightness.
I was very pleased when Youtube added their nightmode feature, which I leave on always.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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 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 :-)
In light environments, dark UIs get washed out and are illegible.
I wonder if the creator is a fan of
https://contrastrebellion.com/
It Just Works!
I'm buying this tonight. Thank-you very much.
Specifically, after trying similar extensions, this one is the best. Its css rules fit perfectly for most of the websites which I visit.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Looks great, but I'm just so skeptical of browser extensions now.
I've reported it, but nothing seems to happen.
To me this sounds like the most vital thing to improve trust. Having browser developers review all the source code in detail is unrealistic, and even then, won't defeat underhanded programming (is it a bug or a deliberate vulnerability?). Legal accountability combined with auditability at least provide a deterrent to publishing malicious software.
Is this something specific to Safari extensions? I have never heard of anyone having to do this.
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.
There was a long discussion regarding this review https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9y0s2a/dark_reader_d...
You know, some Apple developer can also put some malicious code into Safari, but for some reason you trust them and use their browser, even though they used to slow down older iPhones without a warning, forcing users upgrade to newer devices. Who knows what they will do the next time.
A hotkey to turn on/off the dark mode is also coming soon and with that the extension will be perfect.
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.
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.
Does it require Chrome and Firefox to implement prefers-color-scheme first?
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.
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
Here are some more details https://darkreader.org/help/en/#theme-generation-modes
The white sheet of paper metaphor of black on white text is to my sensitive eyes really a shining bright light in my face - I always try to reverse, invert, darken to white on black text - but black borders and black bars ( android buttons grrr ) then annoying flip to white !
Many thanks this is really good.
Thanks for building a great extension! I plan on keeping this installed for a long time :)
I don't see why a separate extension is needed.
Thank you and kudos.
My only question is with the promotion of a paid Safari extension whether the developer is concerned about a possible trademark infringement suit.
I am sure this will mess up some sites, but for the VAST majority of them this is awesome!
The only gripe I have is that it is a biiit heavy on the resources.
This doesn't sound good, I wouldn't like to allow an extension to access my data in bank websites.
You must also trust the dependencies of the application as well - refreshingly there is only one called malevic [0], which itself has no dependencies.
My impression is that the author of this extension is genuinely just trying to make something good for the benefit of the community but it's not as though Chrome extensions haven't been purchased before. Also we must trust that the published extension is the same as the extension in the Github repository, I don't know of a way to verify this.
The only way to probably be safe is to audit the source code yourself and install it in development mode. Or just use a different profile for truly sensitive stuff vs just casual browsing.
It's a document repository for caching HTML content offline, managing PDFs, annotating and creating flashcards on the documents you're managing.
We looked at adding dark mode but it didn't work exactly like I would have hoped so I'm going to take a look at this extension and see if they used any tricks I didn't think of.
from the github:
> This extension inverts brightness of web pages
i guess a related question is can it be activated for individual pages (as opposed to for-all-pages)
So you should be able to use it that way round.
Dynamic mode is slower at start, but has no impact on performance after all the stylesheets were analyzed.
does your extension run on android? there are two motivations for nightlight aside from its obvious purpose:
1) be fast on android 2) keep source code simple as possible so everything the extension does is obvious. when i wrote nightlight it was difficult to evaluate the safety of the other extensions at the time, something important to me for a plugin which has full access to all browsing
It is, theoretically, possible to distribute without the App Store, but users need to activate Developer mode and do quite a few manual steps. It's not a click (or drag and drop) like FF and Chromium Based browsers.
Stylus is one of the handy FF extensions, which allows to switch between CSS themes quickly/easily.
Global CSS will work well on text websites. For many others it will break up the coloring and make page parts hardly distinguishable.