I’m really surprised that it works as well as it does, given the insane amount of stuff that it interacts with. I’d think that it’d be way more fragile than it is.
“Native”. That every webpage has to implement it themselves is sad. Could be a browser feature that overrides some colors on dark.
Then again, with webapps, probably not.
This is sorta how dark reader and such works. It turns out that implementing dark mode for most websites is more complicated than inverting all the css colors. For example, some gray on white text might have enough contrast to be easily read, but when inverted the text is hard to discern or nearly invisible. Images too, they might have a white background but not look good when inverted. Native support is better
Maybe. Does it make a big performance difference which css (dark reader or delivered by wiki) is used?
Is it known how the default to dark mode setting is persisted if let’s say a plugin removed all the Wikipedia cookies on window close? A get or post parameter?
Either way it’s a good thing that wiki offers a dark mode.
Agreed. Well, I don’t know if it’d deal with random images as well, as users can upload those.
and have much less of a performance impact.
For a number of sites, you can just get away with running Dark Reader in static mode and it works well enough. Considerably faster.
EDIT: Actually, thanks for reminding me. I’ve never donated to Dark Reader, and it looks like they ask for a $10 donation if you use it regularly, and that plugin has dramatically improved my Web-browsing experience. Going to do that now.
Not a fan of dark reader. It has a weird blue tint to things. I much prefer Dark Background and Light Text. That extensions has a true black background.
How are you doing this? My DE is KDE Plasma and Koi seems to work for this based on my limited searching but I don’t know how well, do you know of something better? (Also I’m using the tree background and I’m hoping to get that to switch too).
I don’t think KDE has a native way to do this, I’ve also heard of Koi for this but I haven’t used it. I’m mostly a Mac user where this is just a default option.
So, if I’m reading this right it’s basically just a 17 paragraph essay that boils down to, “Sorry we suck at CSS and it took us a decade to finally get around to rooting out all the random shit from 2014 that was hard-coded to display as rgb(0,0,0) or whatever, which was a capability that in retrospect we really shouldn’t have handed out like candy?”
The TV Tropes wiki has managed to have a built in dark mode for at least the last 7 years. TV Tropes. Come on, guys.
I’m baffled by the section about “making a shortcut that darkens all the colors on the page.” I’m positive that’s the intent of that entire blurb, to dazzle people with bullshit in the hopes that they won’t ask Hard Questions, because no competent designer would ever try such a thing. It is a self-evidently moronic idea. You don’t fuck with elements you didn’t create and don’t control, like images and color swatches.
There are only really two viable possibilities, here:
If arbitrary user definable, hard-coded colors in content are permissible, you’ll have to accept the fact that the cards will fall where they may and some instances will inherently be suboptimal in either light or dark modes, or…
Accept that you won’t allow users to hard-code colors into anything outside of specific elements where that usage is valid, so users will just have to suck it up and pick from a list of preapproved color combinations with light and dark mode renditions.
The TV Tropes wiki has managed to have a built in dark mode for at least the last 7 years. TV Tropes. Come on, guys.
It’d be kind of interesting to have a “dark mode spider” that crawls the Web and checks to see what percentage of websites support the browser-requested dark mode. I’d be kind of curious to see how far along we are.
I mean, people have done it for stuff like IPv6 support for a while.
Oh, it’s a tool that you run on one page, rather than a spider to try to gather statistics on the Web as a whole. But, yeah, that run en masse could maybe gather that kind of information.
Websites specifying color for foreground (or background) and assuming browsers will use whatever color they’re expecting for the other has always existed, and still exists
If you’re getting fancy and specifying colors, you can’t cheap out and not specify all colors
If the browser ignores all your colors at that point, then it’s displaying as the user intended
If you only specified some of the colors, it’s a bug of the website
There are actually things websites can do which may be more common than you’d think. At a high level you could convert all the custom colours to HSV format and slightly lower the value and saturation according to some function. This is fairly common for images.
I’d rather be informed with a popup than have to remember to periodically check the settings in case they’ve maybe added dark mode. Tying this to “advertising tactics” is, well, ridiculous – they’re informing users about a new feature they might not otherwise learn about, not selling literally anything
Yes, but not because the header is a distraction — it’s generally less obtrusive. I’m not convinced that they actually need the money to achieve the goals of the foundation, but that’s another matter of opinion in how I think they spend those funds. I’ve donated in the past.
I don’t mind the pop up as much as I mind it being a pop up that tells you to go to another menu to change the setting. Why not just put the setting in the pop up?
You give the information on where the setting is, then have an “enable now” button that calls the exact same function as clicking the toggle on the other page does. Having multiple ways to do the same thing isn’t unusual and is trivial with properly designed code.
No. It isn’t. The setting in the modal should act as a convenience component that doesn’t have any of its own data. It only modifies the value in the original source of truth. Once the modal has been used, it should never pop up again, as the assumption will be if the user has interacted with the modal, they are now aware of the setting and can set it themselves from the original source of truth. Unless of course you consider any feature speghettification
I’ve always been kind of curious: am I weird because I prefer light mode for web pages with a lot of text to read? Or is it more of an age-gated thing, like older people who grew up reading printed texts only prefer what’s familiar to them? I’m fine with YouTube (for example) having a black background and dark theme, but I even browse Lemmy via old.lemmy.world in light mode!
How old are you? I’m in my early 30s, definitely grew up with computers most of my life, and internet almost as long, but also read plenty of physical paper books. I greatly prefer darker color schemes.
That said, I’m also a software developer so I’m a bit biased and learned long ago that dark mode is much easier on the eyes when coding for hours on end, so maybe I’m just used to it.
I prefer light mode because dark mode gives me a raging headache in under 10 minutes, not enough contrast or something, I’m not sure. It’s bad enough that if I’m pairing with someone and they use dark mode I’ve gotta frequently look away or do something like a shared follow mode where I use a light theme on my end - it sucks.
And maybe the science is old now, but in HS I did a report on eye strain and light backgrounds are typically better across the board. But who knows now.
Depends how old you consider old, maybe? Computers back in the day were pretty universally light text on a dark background. VIC-20 was an exception but then even Commodore backpedaled on that with the 64. But you might have had a different experience and are only remembering things like Mac OS or Amiga, or Windows, and maybe that has influenced your preference. 🤷♀️ To each their own, anyway.
My 80’s computer was (by default) bright yellow text over bright blue background.
It probably sounds quite bad. It was. You could change that with a few commands but you’d have to do it each time you boot the thing, and I didn’t bother, it was “normal” to me.
That didn’t prevent young me from spending hours copying lines of BASIC code from magazines, but it was tiring. Nowadays I’m just like, seriously, who thought that colour scheme was a good idea?
I hate dark mode, but it’s because I have a pretty bad astigmatism. Dark mode makes all text look like several mirror images swimming around each other, whereas light mode is fine.
There are times I prefer light mode but dark mode feels better designed.
A few days ago I switched to light mode because it was too sunny outside and switched right back after I was done. The Android UI was unbaerable for me.
Exactly, I toggle via keyboard shortcut depending on lighting conditions. Super nice to have proper dark/light mode support, especially if it can use the system setting.
Light mode is pretty hard on the eyes in dim lighting, the same way dark mode is in full sun. Health-wise, it’s best to decrease the amount of light as bed time approaches and that includes screens beaming light into our face.
My computer defaults to light mode every morning and then I toggle dark later in the day when it becomes the more comfortable setting. So, for me it’s not really about “preference”.
Very happy to have dark mode Wikipedia for late night queries!
Maybe not avoid using entirely, but I can easily imagine someone that can’t use it for more that 10 minutes or so because the brightness causes them headaches.
That’s true, it will make things easier for the current users. But as I said, I doubt if it will increase the overall hits for Wikipedia or be a last straw for people hesitating to use the site
That’s a pretty ableist attitude. You don’t really know how many people and how much are being affected and is easy to dismiss an accessibility option when you’re nor affected.
Ah, well, if you can’t imagine it, then all those people with visual impairments who haven’t been able to read the content previously simply must not exist! 🙄🤦♀️
It does look like you currently need to be logged in to set the setting or set it each time (or, I assume, have your browser retain persistent cookies); the default is light. It’d be kind of nice if it just used the browser “light” or “dark” preference.
Maybe this is just temporary; they do say that the dark mode is “beta”.
All addons don’t won’t work on any Addon/extension page, across all browsers. I don’t know why, but if I had to take an educated guess, it’s so extensions can’t make you download malware addons.
That said, on firefox, you can enable any extention to have thar privilege.
I’ve gone the opposite direction. I’ve slowly been expanding my list of sites that don’t work with ctrl-shift-a and for the most part assuming it will work for all sites
Only skimmed the article: why did their initial theme color solution affect the media contents like international orange? Feels like that would be a non-starter…
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