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!
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.
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!)
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`.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
• 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.
"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?
> 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 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.
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.
FYI, light-dark() in CSS is a thing now.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
And `:prefers-color-scheme` has been supported by all major browsers for seven years.
And broken in Chrome since the beginning:
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/366412383
So I guess it hasn’t been supported anywhere in a sense.
Safari and Firefox are pretty small.
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!
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.
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!)
Please no. Dark mode is extremely difficult to read for me.
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`.
Browsers are user-agents, not website-agents. By way of example, if a website shows ads or does tracking, I will absolutely alter it to my liking.
This is a good thing.
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.The opt outs mentioned in the article, like
should be sufficient to enable dark mode for users who prefer dark mode.For icons, ideally they’d be SVGs controlled by currentColor, but that may not be feasible or convenient depending on your setup.
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.
>will punish the developers of the web as if they did something wrong here
Yes, developers can solve this by simply implementing dark mode.
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 know it's always been this way, but it's weird to me that Apple uses the WebKit blog for Safari product announcements.
Am I still the only one who doesn't use dark mode? My astigmatism can't take it
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 mode all day long.
I find dark mode is better for astigmatism, personally. It also isn't hellish if you have floaters and migraines, unlike light mode.
The preference, either way, is an important accessibility feature.
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.
Is your astigmatism uncorrectable?
Even if it were, it’s easier and more reasonable to fix your app to work with your users, than fixing your users to work with your app.
Not them, but my left eye isn't fully correctable. The average dark mode site looks like I'm driving the Las Vegas strip in the rain.
No.
Finally a fix for HN
Please! I don't use Safari so this won't help me, but switching back to HN from other mostly dark themed sites hurts my eyes :(
Does it go the other way? What if I want light mode on a website that looks dark
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.
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?
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
Bad: it’s tracking you
Worse: it’s attacking you
Worst: it’s attacking someone else as you
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 fear this will lead to a lot of broken websites. That seems to be the case with a lot of the browser plugins that provide the same functionality.
1. It's opt-in. The user is choosing the occasional broken site over light themes.
2. The site can always provide their own dark theme if the automatic one is broken.
There's a mode like this in an Android Chrome fork called Cromite that works surprisingly well. Most of the other options do suck though.
Does this also allow me to lighten sites that default to extremely hard to read dark mode?
I wish the crusade to make everything dark would end.
So do others. https://xkcd.com/3227/
I've always wanted to use Safari as my default browser. I just need them to fix the disappearing favicons in the sidebar tabs. Apple: please fix.
take the wikipedia, no more flashbangs for me HA!
Wikipedia already supports dark mode as a feature of the default Vector 2022 skin.[0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dark_mode
Do they plan to introduce compliance with PWAs any time this decade?
damn
• As a user: great
• 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.
As long as a client needs to approve a layout, that is not happening
Sounds like a problem with the client.
A web agency is not going to start questioning the brand book of a 100x larger client.
> 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.
As a web developer, all you have to do is support `:prefers-color-scheme`.
Re: web developer
> 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.
Wait until you learn I can change the font size and even override the site CSS on my own machine!
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.
"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?
[dead]
[dead]
Thank you, whoever led this!
On the contrary, screw you whoever led it. Who even wants authored styles nowadays.
"Authored"? It just applies a set of rules to the existing stylesheet. It's not like they're customizing it for different websites.
> 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 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.
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.
This is more or less unavoidable to avoid breaking poorly-architected front-ends that rely on styling to handle logic.
It's the user's agent
One less thing to fingerprint.
> So… the browser is now intentionally lying now. Ain’t that great.
To the server. I'm 100% behind this. The unholy amount of control websites have over our web browser should go down, not up.
> 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.
Is this a headline form the year 2015?