Hacker News itself is a prime example of a website that doesn’t support dark mode, but could do so trivially (and, IMO, would look so much better if it did!)
My HN is in dark mode, though the honors for that accomplishment go to the duckduck browser. Been reading HN on dark mode a while now (light mode burns me eyes, only way to use HN for me now is with the Duck)
P.S. the Duck browser literally has a universal dark mode setting, I don't recall a site it wasn't able to dark-force darkify for me (language is fun)
Windows 3 through windows 7 had pervasive support for dark mode as long as application developers didn't custom paint their user interfaces. Application developers started out almost all supporting system colors and gradually over the next 25 years or so started implementing their own custom-drawn interfaces, accelerated by embedded IE/mshtml views and then later even more by Electron. This concluded with practically zero interfaces supporting the system color scheme.
Yeah but "dark mode" for Win3 through WinXP was primarily to support passive matrix LCDs, which required inverted color schemes to appear with enough contrast to read. That is why the built-in "high contrast" color schemes look so aggressively awful.
Yeah, when dark mode became "a thing" my first reaction was "...didn't we have this already?"
I was a theme junkie back in Windows 98 times, but stopped bothering since it became increasingly clear that Microsoft was not really interested in supporting them after XP.
I wouldn't call this part of the situation a bug. I'm sure everyone has their own opinion about which is the "right" way to handle a mismatch of OS level preference and browser level theme though.
The underlying problem is Chrome exposes no (normal) setting to override the OS level setting at all, not necessarily that the preference shall always follow the browser's theme specifically.
This issue is related to appearance setting inside Chrome itself (which sets Chrome's appearance, not how it should work with websites AFAIK). The core feature of prefers-color-scheme (following the OS-level setting) is working as intended.
It is not true that prefers-color-scheme should always follow the OS-level setting. The doc says "The method by which the user expresses their preference can vary. It might be a system-wide setting exposed by the Operating System, or a setting controlled by the user agent."[1]
So if the user sets dark mode in the browser, do they not explicitly express their preference for websites? How could they be more explicit about the setting?
It makes me so angry that they named the CSS function `light-dark` instead of leaving the door open to allowing generic user- or site-specified color schemes. I mean it was right there in all the other mechanisms around this feature, they just had to read and think about why these are structured the way they are, and why "light" and "dark" were always values and not keywords in all of these..:
.... and then we've got `light-dark()`, the goofy looking dragon hanging out to the side of these majestic, forward-thinking parts of the specification.
Did they not look at the prior art and notice that "one of these things is not like the other?" All the other pieces of this puzzle, conceivably, could have one day had something like `:root { color-scheme: halloween }` or `@media (prefers-color-scheme: supercontrast)` but no, we're just going to cement `light-dark()` as the only two possible color schemes we'd ever want to switch between forever.
It’s always irked me that light and dark are given privileged positions in the namespace. They’re just themes (or schemes if you like), like all the other possible themes.
As a user, I'm really excited about this. There are still so many websites that don't support dark mode.
Having built websites myself, I know how much attention it takes to make sure every page and component looks good in both light and dark mode.
It's not perfect yet. Even in the second demo, you can see that the chart remains white, creating a stark contrast with the rest of the page. But it's a great step toward making dark mode work across the web without requiring every developer to implement it themselves.
Personally I'm excited for this on iOS—I find that reading boring stuff in dark mode at minimum brightness on my phone is easily the most effective way for me to fall asleep (contrary to the blue light/no phones in bed advice). With an OLED screen the amount of light emitted is so much lower than any alternative I've tried. For sites like HN (some threads on HN are pretty boring) that don't have a native dark mode, my solution has been setting up the "Accessibility Shortcut" feature to invert the colors on the screen. Three clicks on the lock button and the page inverts. It works okay, but it requires manual intervention for each site depending on whether it supports dark mode.
I have been using a Safari extension called Noir on iPhone for years. Works great on HN and most sites. I have it set to a pure black for HN. Easy to disable per-site when it fails. It syncs to my phone's dark mode. I also read in bed as you've described, with Night Shift turned on and very low brightness. It's great.
I want the opposite. I suffer from astigmatism, which makes white on black hard to read. I wish Safari could turn dark mode websites into light mode websites.
I have similar issue with dark mode applied to content - hurts my eyes. I prefer to have window chrome in dark, to make "fade away". The only application which allows me to have my cake and eat it is Firefox: I can run Windows in dark yet read web in light mode.
I wish Windows would steal this feature for the whole OS: I don't want Notepad to use dark for text, but per-app setting usually turns the whole app light.
I use dark mode for everything, so I'm pretty happy about this. Some sites were clearly designed to be light, and forcing dark on them could break the experience, but that's exactly what `color-scheme: light only` is for, and it's good that Safari respects it. Other than that it feels like a win-win to me: great for dark mode users, and for devs not much changes, you just add "light only" if you don't want your site to be affected.
Everyone should checkout Dark Reader extension, it's been doing adaptive dark mode for many years, and it's customisable. It even does light mode too. Using it in Firefox on HN right now!
I just noticed that Dark Reader stopped working for me. Turns out I accidentally installed "Dark Mode", a potentially malicious clone that got blocked :/
No. It’s stupid. There’s a reason we don’t write white text on black paper. There’s a reason the first Mac showing black text on a white background was such an improvement.
I don’t get the point at all (and don’t want to hear it, I’ve seen the arguments before).
It’s nice it’s there for people who want it but it baffles me it’s constantly treated like the greatest thing ever.
> There’s a reason we don’t write white text on black paper.
Because wood is bright and you can’t really print white ink on a black paper?
There might be a usability advantage but using black ink on white paper doesn’t really prove that, that’s just the easier option of the two possible choices.
No, you’re not the only one, I can’t read dark mode, it’s all blurry, makes me squint and gives me a headache. Light colors all day long. Light mode is not a mode - it’s the default.
For me I cannot deal with dark mode in bright environments, but equally it's fairly hard (though less hard) when using light mode in dark environments. It's why Dark Reader has been such a huge quality of life improvement for me.
I don't use it either, and find most website dark modes really difficult to read. The text blurs together or worse, it gets "burned in" to my vision briefly (not sure what that phenomenon is called). I especially dislike the ones that are pitch black instead of the cool grey/dark grey. I was hoping this "Adaptive Dark Mode" announcement was going to adaptively do away with the pitch black dark modes that make it impossible for me to read a website by adapting them to any other color scheme. =P
> When transforming text color, Adaptive Dark Mode aims for sufficient contrast as defined by the WCAG 4.5:1 contrast ratio.
The WCAG 2 contrast checker is known to be inaccurate, specifically for light on dark color combinations (i.e. dark mode) so 4.5:1 isn't always going to be easy to read. The APCA contrast checker was being considered for WCAG 3 that corrects for flaws like this:
You're out of luck if, like me, you have a problem with astigmatic halation. All the cool kids use dark mode.
iOS since 26 has been presenting parts of the system in dark mode despite having the device set to light only. One of the ‘best’ is that launcher groups switch to dark background, but they forgot to switch the text colour, so app names are unreadable. I had hoped iOS 27 would fix it, but no, so I'm switching to Android.
Chrome also has a functional adaptive dark mode (no extension required!), but it is hidden behind an experimental flag `enable-force-dark` as an origin trial on desktop. I am surprised that the Chrome team have not surfaced this to users earlier (outside of Android Chrome, where it is available as a 'Dark Mode' toggle).
To try it, go to chrome://flags and search for Dark Mode, then enable Auto Dark Mode for Web Contents.
Alternatively, you can toggle it on using the Chrome DevTools Rendering tab, as "Enable automatic dark mode"
PSA: Noir is a safari extension that does exactly this and it’s fantastic. Miles better than Dark Reader on performance and refinement. Costs a few bucks but it’s one time and totally worth it.
I was looking through 'Dark Mode' browser plugins for viewing websites last week, and the options aren't great. The 'Dark Reader' plugin that's everywhere sends a lot of silent web requests in the background that seems strange given its mostly just CSS tweaks.
I'd be curious to know more about this. Dark Reader, at least on Firefox, is a recommended addon, which means it gets additional scrutiny by Mozilla. I do agree though that if it does additional web requests, it seems fishy. Do you have any details on where these requests go to or how you found them?
- Checking "Enable remote debugging" and "Enable chrome and add-on debugging toolboxes" in devtools settings, opening Browser Toolbox (Ctrl+Shift+I), and looking at the "Network" tab
or
- Enable add-on debugging and inspect the addon from `about:debugging`
I use stylus on firefox, you can search for styles or write them yourself. I often write dark mode for websites, I'm using a dark mode for hn right now. Also "large mode", it's ridiculous having websites on a 32" limited to 900 px
A pet peeve of mine is websites thinking oh you prefer dark mode so let’s make the background pure black. I cannot take it because the contrast is too much: #fff on #000 is way more uncomfortable than #000 on #fff for me. There are certain developers who continue to think that dark mode is for conserving battery life with an OLED screen so pure black is preferable. I hate that so much that I have turned off dark mode globally. If websites can’t be bothered to implement an actually nice dark theme like Solarized Dark, I’d rather prefer the light mode.
Besides Solarized Dark, GitHub’s Soft Dark theme is quite well done, but unfortunately it’s not the default for a logged-out user with dark mode. So with dark mode I need to log in to GitHub to get acceptable colors.
Now that I think about it, I need a feature to limit the darkness of colors anywhere on the page, background or text except images. Remap #000 to #222 and #fff to #ddd.
Really happy to see this. Users begged me to add dark mode to my sites for years and it's been nothing but a pain to support since adding it. If other browsers pick up something similar, I look forward to the day I can finally remove "manual" dark mode support and just leave it up to the browser.
I guess if you truly don’t care about it sure, this is probably going to be an improvement, but if you are willing to invest even a bit of effort I strongly think you’d want to decide how your website looks like in dark mode.
I'd estimate I've probably spent 100+ hours testing and fixing dark mode issues over the past 5-10 years. Investing "a little bit of effort" is how I got myself into the trap of doubling+ UI QA time to make sure everything _also_ looks good in dark mode (and also in dark mode across a matrix of other configurations) every time I want to ship anything new to users.
I know some people care about dark mode (and that's why I bit the bullet to add it), but I'd honestly much rather have spent all that time working on actual features.
It’s not. The feature is implemented deep within WebKit so it makes sense to be on this blog.
> It’s precisely because Adaptive Dark Mode is happening deep within the WebKit browser engine that we are able to find creative ways to solve the most complex challenges, apply the transformations with great speed and power efficiency
If this ends up working anything like the Gmail Dark Mode implementations on iOS and Android that have drove developers insane and users mad, then I expect both parties to become upset. It is easy to view this as a win for users, but the moment this doesn't work well in various scenarios, the vocal minority will punish the developers of the web as if they did something wrong here, and everyone loses.
Here is to hoping that is not the case, and they did a good job with the implementation in Safari, but I have my suspicions.
Your imagination for what can go wrong seems limited in my eyes. I've been in the trenches where a specification was not followed, or was wrong from the beginning. That can be the case here.
This is surely going to be optional, so it won't impact me in the slightest, but it is a pet peeve of mine when browsers (or browser extensions, looking at you 1Password) alter the UI of websites away from how they were originally designed without explicit instruction to do so.
This sounds like it meets that threshold, it will just surely be a hit-or-miss mess. Hopefully if it makes it to iOS it will drive more site owners to adapt to `prefers-color-scheme`.
This is much better than the absolute embarrassment Mozilla tried with alternate page styles. I swear no one at Mozilla ever tested out the feature considering the style you select does not get persisted so the next time you navigate it reverts back to the original style.
Meanwhile this features is actually tired to a persisted device setting that doesn't get reset every time you go to a new page.
Wikipedia allows you to write any custom CSS. In 2012/2013 when Facebook IPO’ed and was the cool thing I made a user CSS that made Wikipedia look like Facebook.
• As a web developer: what a nightmare, now your website will look different to different people, as if having to support multiple browser engines and multiple screen rations, and multiple platforms, etc. was not a big pile of problems already.
• As someone who doesn’t like dark-mode due to eye strain: good-good… for people who like it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I like to think of it as a gentle encouragement to finally implement prefers-color-scheme in web applications.
(I say this as a designer who has spent countless hours on dark-mode palettes as well as someone who has the automatic circadian toggle enabled everywhere.)
> what a nightmare, now your website will look different to different people
That's what the web has always been. People don't all have the same display types, the same subpixel layouts, the same display sizes, the same DPIs, the same fonts, the same zoom levels... People use reader modes, global restyling extensions, per-site custom style sheets, full screen magnifiers, bounded/partial magnifiers, screen readers, OS high-contrast modes... the web has never been a fixed canvas that you get to paint on and then hand to users.
disagree. the web specifically is built as a dynamic medium for consumption. The fluid nature is the point. Yes, it is harder for developers to force a consistent experience, but as a professional web dev, we should not treat the web as a fixed medium.
> The HTML <meta name="color-scheme" content="light only"> tag lets browsers know that 1) this page supports light mode and 2) should only be displayed in light mode.
Even as a developer I'm all for it, go even harder. We may eventually reach the promised land where the user agent defines so much of the final appearance things like "pixel perfect design" or beating standard controls into within an inch of their lives to fit some design system are a thing of the past.
> Safari prevents websites from detecting when Adaptive Dark Mode has been applied. JavaScript that queries CSS colors will get the original authored colors, not the transformed ones. Any images drawn into canvas render in their original form.
So… the browser is now intentionally lying now. Ain’t that great.
Browsers already intentionally lie all the time, and have had to for years, because fingerprinting and tracking by various ad networks and bad actors has been rampant.
Browsers lie all the time. Browsers also prevent sites from getting the color of a link because visited links can be shown in a different color and this can be used by the site to tell if a user has ever visited a link.
Don’t you love it when browsers lie to websites to enhance the user’s privacy.
"Websites aren't making dark mode versions! WE'LL DO IT FOR THEM!"
This has to be the result of some passion project by yet another whacko dark mode fanatic (you know who you are). Non-standard, assuredly buggy, and basically a maintenance nightmare. Good luck with that craziness.
Can we have another setting which turns dark websites into actually readable light designs for adults?
For anyone using Zen browser, you can accomplish this on a site by site basis using the newer "Boosts" feature available via the extensions button in the url bar
Personally, I find it close to perfect for Gmail and HN, among others
P.S. the Duck browser literally has a universal dark mode setting, I don't recall a site it wasn't able to dark-force darkify for me (language is fun)
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
I was a theme junkie back in Windows 98 times, but stopped bothering since it became increasingly clear that Microsoft was not really interested in supporting them after XP.
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/366412383
The underlying problem is Chrome exposes no (normal) setting to override the OS level setting at all, not necessarily that the preference shall always follow the browser's theme specifically.
So if the user sets dark mode in the browser, do they not explicitly express their preference for websites? How could they be more explicit about the setting?
[1]https://drafts.csswg.org/mediaqueries-5/#prefers-color-schem...
Safari and Firefox are pretty small.
Did they not look at the prior art and notice that "one of these things is not like the other?" All the other pieces of this puzzle, conceivably, could have one day had something like `:root { color-scheme: halloween }` or `@media (prefers-color-scheme: supercontrast)` but no, we're just going to cement `light-dark()` as the only two possible color schemes we'd ever want to switch between forever.
Having built websites myself, I know how much attention it takes to make sure every page and component looks good in both light and dark mode.
It's not perfect yet. Even in the second demo, you can see that the chart remains white, creating a stark contrast with the rest of the page. But it's a great step toward making dark mode work across the web without requiring every developer to implement it themselves.
But whether it is my os ui or my phone ui, I feel like I can't distinguish borders and boundaries in the UI as well as I can with light mode.
I wish Windows would steal this feature for the whole OS: I don't want Notepad to use dark for text, but per-app setting usually turns the whole app light.
I added dark mode to my blog a while ago and it was a little trying to do properly.
You can implement a half-assed dark mode yourself by adding the following css.
All your images will be inverted as well, which doesn’t work well for photos.For icons, ideally they’d be SVGs controlled by currentColor, but that may not be feasible or convenient depending on your setup.
I don’t get the point at all (and don’t want to hear it, I’ve seen the arguments before).
It’s nice it’s there for people who want it but it baffles me it’s constantly treated like the greatest thing ever.
Because wood is bright and you can’t really print white ink on a black paper?
There might be a usability advantage but using black ink on white paper doesn’t really prove that, that’s just the easier option of the two possible choices.
The preference, either way, is an important accessibility feature.
The WCAG 2 contrast checker is known to be inaccurate, specifically for light on dark color combinations (i.e. dark mode) so 4.5:1 isn't always going to be easy to read. The APCA contrast checker was being considered for WCAG 3 that corrects for flaws like this:
https://git.apcacontrast.com/documentation/APCAeasyIntro.htm...
iOS since 26 has been presenting parts of the system in dark mode despite having the device set to light only. One of the ‘best’ is that launcher groups switch to dark background, but they forgot to switch the text colour, so app names are unreadable. I had hoped iOS 27 would fix it, but no, so I'm switching to Android.
To try it, go to chrome://flags and search for Dark Mode, then enable Auto Dark Mode for Web Contents.
Alternatively, you can toggle it on using the Chrome DevTools Rendering tab, as "Enable automatic dark mode"
In dark mode, any windows that aren't dark can be huge eyesores.
I recently made a menu bar utility to enable per-window color invert for this reason: https://github.com/pazimzadeh/WindowInvert/
It helps for apps that don't have dark mode yet (Pages, etc) and even some apps that do (Preview has a dark mode, but it doesn't work on old PDF's).
- Checking "Enable remote debugging" and "Enable chrome and add-on debugging toolboxes" in devtools settings, opening Browser Toolbox (Ctrl+Shift+I), and looking at the "Network" tab
or
- Enable add-on debugging and inspect the addon from `about:debugging`
Worse: it’s attacking you
Worst: it’s attacking someone else as you
Besides Solarized Dark, GitHub’s Soft Dark theme is quite well done, but unfortunately it’s not the default for a logged-out user with dark mode. So with dark mode I need to log in to GitHub to get acceptable colors.
Now that I think about it, I need a feature to limit the darkness of colors anywhere on the page, background or text except images. Remap #000 to #222 and #fff to #ddd.
But this Apple arrogance is also why they are Apple. And why you are using a software keyboard and a phone shaped like a dark mirror.
Today it is!
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...
I know some people care about dark mode (and that's why I bit the bullet to add it), but I'd honestly much rather have spent all that time working on actual features.
2. The site can always provide their own dark theme if the automatic one is broken.
> It’s precisely because Adaptive Dark Mode is happening deep within the WebKit browser engine that we are able to find creative ways to solve the most complex challenges, apply the transformations with great speed and power efficiency
Here is to hoping that is not the case, and they did a good job with the implementation in Safari, but I have my suspicions.
Yes, developers can solve this by simply implementing dark mode.
This sounds like it meets that threshold, it will just surely be a hit-or-miss mess. Hopefully if it makes it to iOS it will drive more site owners to adapt to `prefers-color-scheme`.
I wish the crusade to make everything dark would end.
So do others. https://xkcd.com/3227/
Meanwhile this features is actually tired to a persisted device setting that doesn't get reset every time you go to a new page.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dark_mode
• As a web developer: what a nightmare, now your website will look different to different people, as if having to support multiple browser engines and multiple screen rations, and multiple platforms, etc. was not a big pile of problems already.
• As someone who doesn’t like dark-mode due to eye strain: good-good… for people who like it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(I say this as a designer who has spent countless hours on dark-mode palettes as well as someone who has the automatic circadian toggle enabled everywhere.)
That's what the web has always been. People don't all have the same display types, the same subpixel layouts, the same display sizes, the same DPIs, the same fonts, the same zoom levels... People use reader modes, global restyling extensions, per-site custom style sheets, full screen magnifiers, bounded/partial magnifiers, screen readers, OS high-contrast modes... the web has never been a fixed canvas that you get to paint on and then hand to users.
> The HTML <meta name="color-scheme" content="light only"> tag lets browsers know that 1) this page supports light mode and 2) should only be displayed in light mode.
So… the browser is now intentionally lying now. Ain’t that great.
Don’t you love it when browsers lie to websites to enhance the user’s privacy.
To the server. I'm 100% behind this. The unholy amount of control websites have over our web browser should go down, not up.
Especially when so many lack reasonable ADA compliance.
This has to be the result of some passion project by yet another whacko dark mode fanatic (you know who you are). Non-standard, assuredly buggy, and basically a maintenance nightmare. Good luck with that craziness.
Can we have another setting which turns dark websites into actually readable light designs for adults?
Personally, I find it close to perfect for Gmail and HN, among others