I believe at this point dark mode should be treated as an accessibility feature and built right into browsers and css hints. Until that, just use DarkReader extension with suitable settings. It can change brightness, contrast, saturation and plays well with syntax coloring etc. Screws up only a few sites where you can turn it off on per-site basis. No in-site dark mode does that, and dark modes are often even more toxic than bright modes.

The reason why this is tricky to do is that websites have custom designs. It's not a trivial problem to make a dark mode version of the design. You can't just flip the colors. There are design work in making sure your design works well in both dark and light modes. Most automatic dark mode solutions don't usually work across the board.

How many non-tech people actively choose dark mode?

I (tech) hate dark mode. My wife (very non tech) uses it.

I love dark mode... when it's dark! When my colleagues are using dark mode in a sunny and well-lit room, I'm thinking guys do you just really love squinting?

Well look at you with your well-lit room.

Judging by what I see at work, where people seem to use dark mode during daytime in teams, outlook and others, which isn’t the default AFAIK, I’d say quite a fair bit.

Most people younger than 20 that I know except myself exclusiveley use dark mode.

How many non-tech sites do have it?

Editing incorrect argument: More importantly, how many allow setting a specific contrast instead of just “dark mode” as-is.

My daughter does, and she is a rare example. I consider it a waste of time/resources. Brings me back to black/green displays.

How does dark mode waste time and resources? It technically can save resources.

Someone has to develop and maintain it. It's difficult to quantify the development/datacenter efforts with respect to end user displays. I do doubt dark mode comes ahead at all at any rate. Morealso, OLED displays are overall ill-suited for regular work due to burn-in -- those are the only ones that 'can' save energy (unless you count CRT - but they would be way worse to begin with). The cost of the shorter lifespan OLED (burn-in) would heavily outweight the energy saved - you are looking at 15-20Wh top.

Note: displays with backlight (the extreme vast majority) display blacks by blocking the light, so the dark mode alone doesn't save anything. There are ones with local dimming that can partially benefit.

Local dimming is becoming more popular, OLED is improving, and MiniLED or whatever they call it will be viable one day.

Maybe you're right about that not offsetting whatever server costs though. I don't think "develop and maintain" affects the environment, but maybe OP was including human resources.

And how many can't really use it because of accessibility and vision issues?

dark mode gets harder to read w/ age progressing...

I might be at a loss here, but I cannot use dark-themed webpages. They are totally blurred and unreadable for me... My only hope is that light-themed documents will be kept

That’s because everyone is different and one guys dark mode is another guys eye horror. Sites implementing some dark mode is like public places implementing some accessibility as they see it, with different ideas in every place.

Dark mode should be a set of settings tuned to every user, like glasses. Not a designer’s hallucination about matrix and hackers.

As a matter of fact, I’d like to have similar settings for bright mode as well. Cause designs get out of hand in both modes.

If you haven't had your vision checked recently, might be a good idea to do so because it sounds like you may have astigmatism.

I've been slowly developing it as I get older and one of the most noticeable effects to me is that bright objects on dark backgrounds are becoming blurrier over time. It's most noticeable with lights when driving at night, but I've started to notice it when using dark mode without any additional lighting in the room.

Astigmatism? I have a minor one but points of light on a dark background is the best way to see it.

I’ve had astigmatism ever since a laser eye surgery. It’s unnoticeable 95% of the time, but every site that forces dark mode on me makes it immediately obvious. I immediately find a light switch or leave.

Ah man that's why laser eye surgery scares me. My eyes are pretty bad so a lot of my lens has to be shaved. I noped out of last consultation; they recommended I get a lens inserted behind my cornea cause of that, but there are so many horror stories online

I wouldn’t call my case a horror story. This is still a million times better than how it was, and I’d absolutely go back do it again.

In fact I am considering getting a “tune up” round, but it’s a lot of money and leaves your eyes out of operation for quite a while. Alternatively, I might get astigmatism glasses that I wear exclusively in places I need to see well in low light, for instance movie theater credits are always a challenge (which would be a non-issue if my GF didn’t make us sit through all the credits to every movie we see…)

There’s nothing quite like the quality of life delta that comes from waking up every morning and simply being able to see.

Oh, and with periods of concerted effort I’ve been able to temporarily remove the astigmatism entirely, by basically training my eyes how to focus. There’s a good chance continuing to do that more frequently would give me a permanent fix too.

Ah I didn't mean your experience was a horror story; I've read others that are

Seems to cause issues with black SVG pictures for now

Like in this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_bifurcation

This is why SVGs with a transparent background should use currentColor rather than black.

Yes, this and some maps are not dark-mode ready, so had to revert.

I tried it yesterday and it completely breaks pictures with transparency.

You cannot view a page about electronic circuits with dark mode on as they blend in with the background.

The android app has supported dark mode for years and images have always been broken. I hope it can be fixed, but except "make every transparent image have a white background" I don't know a good solution

When I want to use a site in darkmode, I always use this code as a bookmarklet:

    s=document.createElement('style');
    s.textContent=`
        * {
            color: #2c2 !important;
            background: #222 !important;
            font-family: arial !important;
        }
    `;
    document.head.appendChild(s);

I use a lot of bookmarklets, so I wrote a tool to convert clean code to bookmarklets and vice versa:

https://www.gibney.org/bookmarklet_editor

There is also this:

https://github.com/dolegi/222

But widgets like this don't work as well as native support

I've been using Dark Reader for a long time and even donated for their amazing work. It is my favorite Chrome Extension by a large margin.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dark-reader/eimadpb...

I still think dark mode should be a browser feature. Not a feature of every website.

In a broader sense, the whole design of a site could be selectable via the browser. Similar to how CSS Zengarden works:

https://www.csszengarden.com

But with layouts that are stored on the user's computer and applicable to every website.

CSS zen garden worked because you had people writing different styles for a single HTML document. How would you write styles for every site? Sure CSS does colors, but it also does a lot of other stuff that isn't easily transferrable between websites.

HTML that uses sane markup, ids and classes goes along way towards making CSS skinnable.

They are cool, but I do think there is value to class-light pages.

There are extensions like dark reader and I use them.

But you cannot just flip colors - pictures for example have to fit their background, for not breaking style.

Me too, although I use bookmarklets instead of extensions.

A bookmarklet can change images too.

We would just have to decide on an algorigthm for the images.

For example here on HN - the algo could detect the similarity between the orange in the title bar and the orange in the Logo. And change the logo accordingly.

Or the site could add some semantic info on how the colors should behave.

I dunno, seems kinda weird we've decided that Light Mode and Dark Mode are the Two Themes and every website must be made to support them.

Why can't we just have full on theme support? We've had this before on many websites.

Or even an OS-level feature like it currently is on MacOS. It is very convenient to change the mode globally and have all your apps, including browser, IDE, email, etc. change as well.

So, when will they fix the graphs? It's been going on for over a year. Not that I mind dark mode, but it seems like first you fix the current problems, then you get around to adding new ones.

I use dark mode on my IDEs partially to feel cool. I also use max blue-light mod like Mac's Night Shift on everything. Helps the eyes. Then again, some things I expect to NOT be dark mode.

The best dark mode in a browser I have so far experienced is in Opera, both mobile and desktop.

See also:

Dark mode is not as good for your eyes as you believe (wired.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40904328

You added an extra "d" breaking your link.

Thanks, fixed.

I get that this is cool and all but I just wish they didn’t have to tell me with a modal every time I open a page :(

We could have saved a fortune in electricity if dark mode was a default and as a standard rolled out decades ago across everything.

One of my old CS teachers would rant about googles evil choice of white background.

It's my understanding that most monitor types (except CRT and OLED) are literally just a filter over an always-on white backlight. Is this not correct, or is the light somehow re-absorbed and turned back to energy?

Unfortunately some people will bring up these kind of topics no reasonable person is against (climate change, racism, accessibility, etc.) to support their pre-conceived notion, whether it makes sense or not. We might call this "playing the climate change card".

The weirdest part is a CS prof. ranting about -- the dark mode, display tech, etc. have exceptionally little to do with CS (which is mostly Math). Personally I'd have called the prof. on the nonsense -- google can be evil but that has little to do with their choice of colors.

It's more nuanced than that.

Modern displays do use a backlight, but might not drive it at full brightness for mostly not-white displays.

On the other hand, people tend to crank up the brightness on "dark mode" themes.

I personally do the opposite and use high contrast mode plus low brightness to safe battery on my non adaptive backlight lcd laptop.

It also doesnt make any sense to do this considering brightness is relative. If im wrong about this please show me how.

Kind of; the human eye shifts to adjust for the quantity of light. The ambient lighting in the environment also matters too; both for cameras and eyes. Perception matters.

http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/White_balance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_balance

CRT was universally used in the past. And backlights are dimmed when displaying black most of the time. You can test your power usage of displays yourself if for some reason you dont believe this.

>We could have saved a fortune in electricity if dark mode was a default and as a standard rolled out decades ago across everything.

How - you need an OLED display for this to be a thing, The ones with backlight (well the extreme vast majority) prevent the light from going through.

>One of my old CS teachers would rant about googles evil choice of white background.

That's awkward - get a display and measure the input current with different modes.