• 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)_/¯
> 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.
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.)
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.
Who cares if you can? I am referring to non-tech-savvy web users who barely know what YouTube is: your parents, grandparents, accountant, or city firefighters. There are literally millions of people in this planet who don’t even know what HTML is. The commenters above appear to be criticizing my remark as if I was mistaken. Software developers often lack imagination when it comes to real-world problems.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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
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`
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
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.
Everyone deserves configurable and hackable apps, which is the only real way to work towards universal accessibility.
I can't personally support light modes in my own software because I can't use/test them, but I'd still add an untested one and fix bug reports about it.
I'm just curious about what people mean when they talk about astigmatism in this context, because the term is usually thrown around without qualifications (plain "astigmatism" as opposed to "irregular astigmatism" or "uncorrectable astigmatism"). So I'm curious about the astigmatism of people for whom dark mode on glowing devices is a problem. Is it typically extremely severe? Is it typically uncorrectable? Is it that people's glasses or contacts are often subtly wrong/outdated? Are many astigmatics not myopic or presbyopic enough to wear glasses all the time anyway? Astigmatism is a broad category and I'm curious about the specific impairments people who avoid dark mode have, in part because I have astigmatism and nonetheless prefer (require, really) dark mode because of other vision problems.
My astigmatism is very regular, very mild, correctable, and corrected. Dark mode is still awful for me. Gives me visual snow side effects after too long and generally just makes the astigmatism symptoms worse.
It’d be great if Apple could try this hard in the iOS messages app where there the keyboard is now only dark mode when a background is set.
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.
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.
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
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.
It’s easier, sure. Especially at first. But we’ve had paper for a while now. Different colors of ink too. If light text on dark background was superior, we would be using it. And could have for hundreds of years for anything considered important.
> No. It’s stupid. There’s a reason we don’t write white text on black paper.
That being that black paper is more expensive than white and that we're stuck with historical precedence?
Reading white text on a black background is much, much easier for me, and the few times I've had the pleasure of doing the same with paper, I still found it to be better. I haven't tried longer texts, since nobody's publishing actual books with black paper, but I'm willing to bet it I'd feel the same about those.
This just reads to me the 'serifs are important because they make reading easier (when reading of paper)', which doesn't reflect my lived experience at all. The only reason these phenomena seem to exist are historical accident and people being used to them.
I didn’t used to mind “light mode”, but then flat design took over and the midtones and grays that often composed light mode were replaced by huge swaths of stark white and near-white grays which is blinding at normal display brightness and then too low contrast to work well with low display brightness. After a while of that I started to enable dark mode whenever a platform made it available.
If/when flat design goes the way of the dodo and light themes are designed sanely once again I’ll pick them back up.
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?
I didn't meant that "only OS-level setting should be respected", what I meant is that Chrome's setting is how Chrome themes should look like, not for websites.
Chrome already has a setting to change a specific website's color-scheme, although it's only working when Developer Tools is visible (then with Cmd+Shift+P "Toggle CSS media feature prefers-color-scheme"), so CSS implementation actually follows respecting UA-level preference over OS-level setting.
But again, Chrome doesn't have a feature that lets users to choose which color-scheme they want to browse the web (so there is no bug, but it's a UX issue because their Appearance settings doesn't make it clear to the users what this setting changes) other than the setting they gave to developers. Honestly I would love to see all browsers have an option for how color-scheme settings should apply to websites.
You can set the appearance mode (light, dark, device) under chrome://settings/appearance . If you change the mode, the settings page (which is a website) adopts that mode, so a user would naturally assume this is also the mode for displaying web content.
Yes it's confusing for the end-user, as I said they should improve their UX in that setting page to make it clear what this setting changes.
However, your original comment was saying that prefers-color-scheme is bugged in Chrome is not true. It works as intended: it follows both UA-level and OS-level settings correctly.
The settings in Appearance tab is not a setting for preference when browsing the web. Many apps have a setting to choose if their app should change appearance when OS setting changed (or to override it), they could simply leave out this setting and let Chrome chrome (app ui) always follow the OS setting or always be in default light mode, instead they gave users to choose "how their Chrome browser will look like", not "how every website they visit should look like".
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, 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.
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.
Custom painting isn't the only thing that broke it. You can customize the style (colors) of the native widgets to get a desired look but IIRC you could choose from system colors (follows the theme/mode automatically) or exact colors. Some applications used a mix of them which made the UI look awful if you switched away from whatever the default theme was.
Maybe the apps with the windows classic interface. I remember it starting mainly around the XP days when alls started designing these super ugly (but trendy at the time) rounded corner and bubbly interfaces that were static in resolution and colour scheme.
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.
I’m not sure what kind of function you’re asking for that would support arbitrary user-defined themes. With the if() function and/or @function declarations you could build pretty much any system you want for defining theme-specific values for arbitrary themes.
Color schemes (luminance modes) and color themes (aesthetic styles) are not the same thing. Halloween theme can have light and dark schemes.
Also, prefers-contrast media query exists, which can be used in combination with the luminance modes (color-scheme): halloween-light, halloween-dark, halloween-light-high-contrast, halloween-dark-high-contrast.
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.
Yeah I can’t do dark mode websites because they leave an after image for some time after reading. So I made a Force Light Mode extension that just applies an inverse to any site that forces dark mode on me. Safari 27 now has some Siri extension builder, maybe it can build it for you.
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.
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.
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.
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`.
I'm very in favor of users being able to do whatever they want with websites - I'm all for it. I just don't like extensions making changes without a clean way to disable it, like in 1P
"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?
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 :/
They posted about the was in Ukraine being bad and their disappointment with the Belarusian governments participation in it. https://darkreader.org/blog/no-war/
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)
For me, most dark mode styles are awful (jet black background bright white text). I'd rather have per website toggle so I can apply my own styling when the site's styles suck.
But you can have both? Automatically switching between light and dark mode based on system preferences is handled by CSS, which you can override with your own styling.
I disagree. It's pretty terrible. I use hackerweb.app on mobile and it's much better however it doesn't support posting. Thus I have to torment myself with the regular website to post a comment such as this.
I hate that folks recommend random extensions. Browsers should include style/css editors (with the ability to save and reload styles later) for accessibility. Since we don't have that, uBlock Origin does a lot of heavy lifting, and can add a dark mode to HN and other sites.
I'd share my ruleset, however, I am missing one. Before I switched PCs (motherboard caught fire) I had one that made everything dark mode, didn't dim the text, and buttons/text inputs/other inputs were also properly inverted. I had to make it myself because googling Hacker News dark mode always led to the same broken themes. I forgot to back it up. Adding dark mode doesn't need a bunch of extensions, and while I'm sure the "stylus" extension is probably useful (I haven't used it, sounds like a CSS override extension), UBO does CSS and JS.
Indeed, I just figured I'd share the full setup. IIRC, Stylus was derived from "Stylish", which was a hugely popular CSS override extension that became spyware around 2016 and was taken down in 2018, and now Stylus (and others of course) fill the gap. It would be very nice to have this integrated into the browser, I agree.
Whoops is on me, I misunderstood your question. That theme is there, you have to long press the theme button. Just realized how unintuitive it is, gonna move it to the settings.
No thanks. When you are my age you will understand.
I have no idea why all the fucking vibed websites that swank around the web these days are unable to do a simple thing:
* Have one or more "themes" with dark and light variants
* Query the browser for a preference of light or dark and offer the default theme with the probed variant.
There is also the rather wider issue of accessibility in general. I happen to be an older bloke with astigmatism and rapidly worsening ... fucked up focussing and glasses and that. I'm lucky to have both eyes and decent colour perception and general all around acuity (for a given value of acuity).
It's 2026 FFS. Why on earth is this even being discussed as an issue? We have all these cool vibed efforts that can't even be bothered with simple basics.
People should stop using Imgur. 99% of the time when I click an Imgur link, I get a 403 Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later. I highly doubt that they are, and they are just blocking VPNs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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
> 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) meaning 4.5:1 isn't always going to be easy to read so it's surprising they're not at least using a higher ratio. The APCA contrast checker (was being considered for WCAG 3) is more accurate at measuring readable contrast levels and the docs explain the problems with WCAG 2 more:
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.
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.
Why are people now so obsessed with dark modes? 20 years ago it wasn't a thing at all and computers were just as usable, if not more in some regards. If you wanted a "dark mode" you switched to a tty.
This is awesome because I like reasonable solutions that let me be lazy.
I'm sure there are designers that love dealing with two themes, and will do beautiful work within each theme.
But I'm really fine with letting the computer figure it out. CRM, back office tools, admin dashboards... many clients are approving one design and dark mode is an afterthought. Why can't the computer just... do it for me, and do a better than passable job at that.
Modern CSS has some simpler mechanisms to deal with the light/dark dichotomy now. I translated a blog to support dark mode recently and it wasn't that difficult. The two sticking points were <code> and picking foreground colors that didn't blend in, and the github icon.
The other was Github's icon. But `filter: invert(1)` does a pretty decent job of handling that as long as the icons are black and white.
Can we get apple to enforce consistent 'back' behavior in iOS next?
I just switched after being an Android user since the dawn of the smartphone era. There are some improvements over Android so I'll give them credit but holy hell is navigation just a complete mess. Every app seems to behave differently, and even within the same app you'll see inconsistencies.
Would it really be that hard to provide a universal back gesture that works across apps like Android has? It makes the phone so clunkly and slow.
guessmyname | 7 hours ago
• 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)_/¯
vulcan01 | 7 hours ago
> 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.
Spivak | 7 hours ago
mortenjorck | 7 hours ago
(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.)
apsurd | 7 hours ago
cluckindan | 7 hours ago
Telaneo | 7 hours ago
cluckindan | 7 hours ago
Telaneo | 6 hours ago
threetonesun | 7 hours ago
guessmyname | 4 hours ago
isityettime | 7 hours ago
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.
kps | 7 hours ago
_boffin_ | 7 hours ago
So… the browser is now intentionally lying now. Ain’t that great.
kvuj | 7 hours ago
To the server. I'm 100% behind this. The unholy amount of control websites have over our web browser should go down, not up.
giancarlostoro | 7 hours ago
Especially when so many lack reasonable ADA compliance.
mortenjorck | 7 hours ago
neilalexander | 7 hours ago
mirashii | 7 hours ago
morsch | 7 hours ago
kccqzy | 7 hours ago
Don’t you love it when browsers lie to websites to enhance the user’s privacy.
jordand | 7 hours ago
cluckindan | 7 hours ago
Worse: it’s attacking you
Worst: it’s attacking someone else as you
DuncanCoffee | 7 hours ago
figmert | 7 hours ago
pamcake | 6 hours ago
- 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`
pamcake | 4 hours ago
inshard | 7 hours ago
cluckindan | 7 hours ago
arcanemachiner | 7 hours ago
cluckindan | 5 hours ago
bla3 | 7 hours ago
kccqzy | 6 hours ago
> 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
hahnchen | 7 hours ago
kps | 7 hours ago
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.
much-to-learn | an hour ago
I_am_tiberius | 7 hours ago
reader9274 | 7 hours ago
kkotak | 7 hours ago
Transcendium | 7 hours ago
arcanemachiner | 7 hours ago
kevincox | 7 hours ago
2. The site can always provide their own dark theme if the automatic one is broken.
AndrewStephens | 7 hours ago
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.madeofpalk | 7 hours ago
analog_daddy | 5 hours ago
sheept | 7 hours ago
For icons, ideally they’d be SVGs controlled by currentColor, but that may not be feasible or convenient depending on your setup.
iza | 5 hours ago
grounder | 7 hours ago
JulianPaul | 7 hours ago
madeofpalk | 7 hours ago
isityettime | 7 hours ago
sheept | 7 hours ago
isityettime | 5 hours ago
I can't personally support light modes in my own software because I can't use/test them, but I'd still add an untested one and fix bug reports about it.
I'm just curious about what people mean when they talk about astigmatism in this context, because the term is usually thrown around without qualifications (plain "astigmatism" as opposed to "irregular astigmatism" or "uncorrectable astigmatism"). So I'm curious about the astigmatism of people for whom dark mode on glowing devices is a problem. Is it typically extremely severe? Is it typically uncorrectable? Is it that people's glasses or contacts are often subtly wrong/outdated? Are many astigmatics not myopic or presbyopic enough to wear glasses all the time anyway? Astigmatism is a broad category and I'm curious about the specific impairments people who avoid dark mode have, in part because I have astigmatism and nonetheless prefer (require, really) dark mode because of other vision problems.
much-to-learn | an hour ago
It’d be great if Apple could try this hard in the iOS messages app where there the keyboard is now only dark mode when a background is set.
kps | 7 hours ago
figmert | 7 hours ago
redwall_hp | 7 hours ago
The preference, either way, is an important accessibility feature.
loloquwowndueo | 6 hours ago
nozzlegear | 6 hours ago
wiredfool | 6 hours ago
MBCook | 6 hours ago
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.
echoangle | 5 hours ago
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.
MBCook | 56 minutes ago
kalleboo | 4 hours ago
Apple soon started offering a dark mode as an accessibility feature https://kalleboo.com/linked/mac_closeview_control_panel.png
MBCook | 4 hours ago
It was not an intended way to use things all the time for a large chunk of the user population.
Not the same.
bondolo | 4 hours ago
Telaneo | 42 minutes ago
That being that black paper is more expensive than white and that we're stuck with historical precedence?
Reading white text on a black background is much, much easier for me, and the few times I've had the pleasure of doing the same with paper, I still found it to be better. I haven't tried longer texts, since nobody's publishing actual books with black paper, but I'm willing to bet it I'd feel the same about those.
This just reads to me the 'serifs are important because they make reading easier (when reading of paper)', which doesn't reflect my lived experience at all. The only reason these phenomena seem to exist are historical accident and people being used to them.
ninkendo | 5 hours ago
- Dark mode is harder to read when it’s bright out
- Light mode is blindingly bright when I’m in a dark room (and turning the brightness sufficiently low makes everything look washed out.)
My devices change from light mode to dark mode at sunset and it’s basically ideal.
Also it’s nice to just have less artificial light as the sun sets, which makes falling asleep naturally a bit easier.
rbits | 3 hours ago
consumer451 | 3 hours ago
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...
It's 2026, how does every single website, especially this one, not support this?
cosmic_cheese | an hour ago
If/when flat design goes the way of the dodo and light themes are designed sanely once again I’ll pick them back up.
kickingvegas | 7 hours ago
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
kps | 7 hours ago
jansan | 7 hours ago
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/366412383
kulahan | 6 hours ago
Safari and Firefox are pretty small.
zamadatix | 6 hours ago
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.
omer_balyali | 6 hours ago
jansan | 6 hours ago
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...
omer_balyali | 5 hours ago
Chrome already has a setting to change a specific website's color-scheme, although it's only working when Developer Tools is visible (then with Cmd+Shift+P "Toggle CSS media feature prefers-color-scheme"), so CSS implementation actually follows respecting UA-level preference over OS-level setting.
But again, Chrome doesn't have a feature that lets users to choose which color-scheme they want to browse the web (so there is no bug, but it's a UX issue because their Appearance settings doesn't make it clear to the users what this setting changes) other than the setting they gave to developers. Honestly I would love to see all browsers have an option for how color-scheme settings should apply to websites.
jansan | 5 hours ago
omer_balyali | 5 hours ago
However, your original comment was saying that prefers-color-scheme is bugged in Chrome is not true. It works as intended: it follows both UA-level and OS-level settings correctly.
The settings in Appearance tab is not a setting for preference when browsing the web. Many apps have a setting to choose if their app should change appearance when OS setting changed (or to override it), they could simply leave out this setting and let Chrome chrome (app ui) always follow the OS setting or always be in default light mode, instead they gave users to choose "how their Chrome browser will look like", not "how every website they visit should look like".
cosmotic | 6 hours ago
toyg | 6 hours ago
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.
da_chicken | 6 hours ago
Rohansi | 5 hours ago
Melatonic | 11 minutes ago
denkmoon | 5 minutes ago
akersten | 6 hours ago
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.
have_faith | 6 hours ago
steve1977 | 19 minutes ago
tshaddox | 4 hours ago
hexasquid | 4 hours ago
hexasquid | 3 hours ago
omer_balyali | 3 hours ago
Also, prefers-contrast media query exists, which can be used in combination with the luminance modes (color-scheme): halloween-light, halloween-dark, halloween-light-high-contrast, halloween-dark-high-contrast.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47832705
nsoam | 7 hours ago
jimbobimbo | 6 hours ago
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.
0x1F8B | 5 hours ago
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.
cj00 | 4 hours ago
Melatonic | 10 minutes ago
roflchoppa | 7 hours ago
sheept | 7 hours ago
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dark_mode
roflchoppa | 6 hours ago
kccqzy | 6 hours ago
vinnymac | 7 hours ago
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.
aaomidi | 7 hours ago
Yes, developers can solve this by simply implementing dark mode.
vinnymac | 7 hours ago
marcellosso | 7 hours ago
joshuat | 7 hours ago
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`.
JoshTriplett | 7 hours ago
wpm | 6 hours ago
joshuat | 4 hours ago
russellbeattie | 7 hours ago
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?
cyanydeez | 7 hours ago
nouman0x45 | 7 hours ago
loloquwowndueo | 7 hours ago
I wish the crusade to make everything dark would end.
So do others. https://xkcd.com/3227/
greazy | 6 hours ago
ckdot | 6 hours ago
Telaneo | 6 hours ago
lnvdpwl | 6 hours ago
tehnub | 6 hours ago
chrisra | 6 hours ago
accelbred | 5 hours ago
NooneAtAll5 | 5 hours ago
kstrauser | 3 hours ago
voxic11 | an hour ago
kstrauser | 27 minutes ago
Reason077 | 6 hours ago
loloquwowndueo | 6 hours ago
simonjgreen | 6 hours ago
dmd | 6 hours ago
doublepg23 | 5 hours ago
peregren | 6 hours ago
davidhs | 6 hours ago
Mistletoe | 5 hours ago
therealmarv | 6 hours ago
quantumink | 6 hours ago
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)
ivanjermakov | 6 hours ago
NooneAtAll5 | 5 hours ago
Rohansi | 5 hours ago
hackinthebochs | 3 hours ago
Rohansi | 9 minutes ago
codazoda | 5 hours ago
entropie | 4 hours ago
eek2121 | 4 hours ago
altairprime | 6 hours ago
consumer451 | 5 hours ago
The fact that this website wasn’t capable of dark mode made me create a CSS overlay on desktop.
I am back to somewhat normal now with my eyes, but I feel really bad for anyone in the same position.
I know that the current exact HN is magic, but come on. There is CSS to detect the system’s theme. There is no need to create a button or anything.
tensor | 5 hours ago
drnick1 | 5 hours ago
kzemek | 5 hours ago
bmurphy1976 | 5 hours ago
accrual | 5 hours ago
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686639
eek2121 | 4 hours ago
I'd share my ruleset, however, I am missing one. Before I switched PCs (motherboard caught fire) I had one that made everything dark mode, didn't dim the text, and buttons/text inputs/other inputs were also properly inverted. I had to make it myself because googling Hacker News dark mode always led to the same broken themes. I forgot to back it up. Adding dark mode doesn't need a bunch of extensions, and while I'm sure the "stylus" extension is probably useful (I haven't used it, sounds like a CSS override extension), UBO does CSS and JS.
Just my thoughts. Don't mind me.
brigandish | 4 hours ago
plorkyeran | 3 hours ago
accrual | 3 hours ago
postalcoder | 4 hours ago
it now has many dark themes, bloomberg is my favorite.
gooseyman | 4 hours ago
Where are the themes? (I might be missing on mobile)
postalcoder | 4 hours ago
gooseyman | 4 hours ago
postalcoder | 4 hours ago
gerdesj | 4 hours ago
I have no idea why all the fucking vibed websites that swank around the web these days are unable to do a simple thing:
There is also the rather wider issue of accessibility in general. I happen to be an older bloke with astigmatism and rapidly worsening ... fucked up focussing and glasses and that. I'm lucky to have both eyes and decent colour perception and general all around acuity (for a given value of acuity).It's 2026 FFS. Why on earth is this even being discussed as an issue? We have all these cool vibed efforts that can't even be bothered with simple basics.
cheald | 4 hours ago
aleksandrm | 4 hours ago
cheald | 4 hours ago
willio58 | 4 hours ago
matthova | 3 hours ago
I do appreciate how minimalist hackernews tries to be, but I think respecting the operating system's theme can be considered very minimalist
SpliffnCola | 3 hours ago
Javascript: https://pastebin.com/50EUfktL CSS: https://pastebin.com/nzEhxxBY
internet2000 | an hour ago
drusepth | 6 hours ago
pamcake | 6 hours ago
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...
saagarjha | 6 hours ago
drusepth | 6 hours ago
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.
charcircuit | 6 hours ago
Meanwhile this features is actually tired to a persisted device setting that doesn't get reset every time you go to a new page.
pazimzadeh | 6 hours ago
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).
senderista | 6 hours ago
speedping | 6 hours ago
PalmPilotProMax | 5 hours ago
Sounds like the Noir dev is going to be the next victim of Apple's Sherlocking.
hendersoon | 6 hours ago
macNchz | 6 hours ago
mh- | 5 hours ago
famfamfam | 6 hours ago
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"
arccy | 6 hours ago
prh8 | 6 hours ago
Personally, I find it close to perfect for Gmail and HN, among others
seanwilson | 6 hours ago
The WCAG 2 contrast checker is known to be inaccurate, specifically for light on dark color combinations (i.e. dark mode) meaning 4.5:1 isn't always going to be easy to read so it's surprising they're not at least using a higher ratio. The APCA contrast checker (was being considered for WCAG 3) is more accurate at measuring readable contrast levels and the docs explain the problems with WCAG 2 more:
https://git.apcacontrast.com/documentation/APCAeasyIntro.htm...
accidc | 6 hours ago
drfloyd51 | 6 hours ago
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.
accelbred | 5 hours ago
kccqzy | 6 hours ago
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.
stwrt | 6 hours ago
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.
accelbred | 5 hours ago
dawnerd | 5 hours ago
mrbonner | 5 hours ago
nixass | 5 hours ago
drnick1 | 5 hours ago
sdf4j | 4 hours ago
efields | 4 hours ago
I'm sure there are designers that love dealing with two themes, and will do beautiful work within each theme.
But I'm really fine with letting the computer figure it out. CRM, back office tools, admin dashboards... many clients are approving one design and dark mode is an afterthought. Why can't the computer just... do it for me, and do a better than passable job at that.
hinkley | 4 hours ago
The other was Github's icon. But `filter: invert(1)` does a pretty decent job of handling that as long as the icons are black and white.
01100011 | 4 hours ago
I just switched after being an Android user since the dawn of the smartphone era. There are some improvements over Android so I'll give them credit but holy hell is navigation just a complete mess. Every app seems to behave differently, and even within the same app you'll see inconsistencies.
Would it really be that hard to provide a universal back gesture that works across apps like Android has? It makes the phone so clunkly and slow.
gooseyman | 4 hours ago
I use the brave beta appearance option "Dark Mode" and every now and then a site is almost unreadable.
tiffanyh | 3 hours ago
Because correct me if I’m wrong, neither of these features were in the Tech Preview.
And numerous features have been in Tech Preview that have never made it into mainline Safari.
stwrt | 3 hours ago
Safari Beta is generally what you'd want to use to test features coming to the next Safari release.
And yes, features appearing in Technology Preview aren't necessarily guaranteed to ship in Safari.
ayaros | 3 hours ago
etatester | an hour ago
sivanmz | an hour ago