Show HN: Dark Reader extension – Dark mode for every website (opens in new tab)

There is a nice extension, Automatic Reader View [0], which automatically enables Firefox reader view, if available for the visited page. I even used it in blacklist mode for a while, which wasn't bad but after some time I ended up using it in whitelist mode, because it was too extreme for me.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

You can set dark mode in reader view (firefox mobile)

Bad performance in Firefox is a known issue and I'm working on improving it. It's not an issue in Chrome and Safari. Low performance can be noticeable in new GMail design, but the reason is their heavy stylesheets full of unused code and images, that Dark Reader tries to analyze. Some day it will be fixed by adding some static themes for popular websites.

a fast and simple alternative for firefox (and android) is this one:

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)

Just added the extension to give it a whirl. My CPU usage is 3% to 4%, memory is ~37%, on an i7 wih 16 GB RAM (and about 100 tabs open in Firefox).

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 :)

I just bought for Safari and immediately uninstalled because CPU usage was too heavy and didn't come down. Also, permissions are way too intrusive, why does the extension need to have access to all of my browsing history?

I’m using Night Reader for Safari right now, it allows using hotkeys for toggling between dark and light. Didn’t notice any hit on the performance.

unfortunately still a bit resource intensive, agreed that I like the extension if I ignored that bit

I experienced the same thing. Waiting until the problem is fixed to use again but it was a really useful albeit slow extension.

I have used it a lot on both Firefox and Chrome. It's much slower on Firefox.

With Safari on macOS, the OS reports a negligible energy impact for the extension.

How are you seeing what CPU usage is used on a per extension basis?

I'll have to try that. I never had performance issues with Dark Reader on Chrome, but I find it to be slow on Firefox.

ooh, this one is way less intensive on resources.

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.

Gmail is pretty slow in Firefox no matter what.

Here are the filters: https://gitlab.com/o9000/darken/blob/master/chrome/style.css

This actually seems better (more lightweight and easier to read dark colors schemes) then the Dark Reader extension.

Can we also choose which web pages not to add dark theme?

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?

I was about to post this. My office has way too much fluorescent light so I can see all my floaters. This extension keeps me sane.

What browser are you using? I've been using this extension for a couple years and I notice that it is much slower on Firefox compared to Chrome.

Unfortunately Chrome and Firefox API has no this feature yet. Time Settings (ability to set active hours) were implemented recently and soon will be published.

Also GreaseMonkey for user customized javascript

There's the Stylish extension since 2005

Dark Reader provides all 3 possible modes: - Static: simple and fast. - Filter: simple, but uses GPU very much and usually inverts already dark parts. - Dynamic: complex, but tries to achieve the best visual results. There are some known issues and the work on it is in progress.

Here are some more details https://darkreader.org/help/en/#theme-generation-modes

No. You can locate the files of the extension and ensure that it doesn't make anything severe, the code is not obfuscated.

You can already use per-site settings https://darkreader.org/blog/custom-site-settings/

I'm an author of both Dark Reader and Dark Reader for Safari.

I've developed a few Chrome extensions myself - it needs that to work. The only way to make it work is to injecting a script into your current webpage, which changes the appearance. Unfortunately there is no way to also disable the network connections of that script so it could hypothetically contact another website and leak your data - note it cannot leak cookies if they are HTTP only, but this depends on your sensitive website's web developer being competent.

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.

[0] https://github.com/alexanderby/malevic

You can whitelist or blacklist. There's a toggle to make it invert listed sites only, or don't invert the sites on the list.

So you should be able to use it that way round.

Your code is based on CSS filters. Dark Reader provides this mode too, but also allows users to fix and share wrongly inverted parts https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/blob/master/src/con...

Dynamic mode is slower at start, but has no impact on performance after all the stylesheets were analyzed.

Of course it will be cheaper. When you take some code from the original Dark Reader, obfuscate it, add some features, then you can put a $2 label.

Dark Reader is free, this does not seem cheaper.

One reason might be that you need to shell out $99 every year to be allowed to publish official Safari extensions.

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.

The quick answer is: it makes it possible to work on project full-time. Only 1 of 2000 makes a donation https://darkreader.org/blog/500k-users/

The newest Opera has some changes, to make the extension work on Google Search you have to open Extensions page and click "Allow access to search page results".

Just checked, it works on Canary too.

Dark Reader also offers static CSS support https://darkreader.org/blog/stylish/

Global CSS will work well on text websites. For many others it will break up the coloring and make page parts hardly distinguishable.