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!)
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.
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.
I am not sure how someone can think it is correct to follow the OS settings for browser content if the browser explicitly allows setting the dark mode. What else is the browser setting for?
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 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.
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.
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 :/
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.
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.
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`.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
• 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.)
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.
> 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.
> 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?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
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.
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.
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.
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`.
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.
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).
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...
The preference, either way, is an important accessibility feature.
- 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
2. The site can always provide their own dark theme if the automatic one is broken.
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?