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All Devices Dark theme, does it darken webpages also?
- Thread starter spinedoc77
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I tried it a year or ao ago and didn't like it that much. It feels very basic and lacks features like the ability to force zoom if the webpages doesn't support it. Plus, the dev never update it after he release it.
The best browser I found for this kind of mode is Dark night browser (but I don't like the gestures for that browser) and Night mode on Firefox.
There is stuff even for lazy busy devs like:
https://darkmodejs.learn.uno/
"Add a dark-mode / night-mode to your website in a few seconds
This library uses the css mix-blend-mode in order to bring Dark-mode to any of your websites. Just copy paste the snippet and you will get a widget to turn on and off the dark-mode. You can also use it without the widget programmatically. The plugin is lightweight, built in VanillaJS. It also uses localstorage by default so your last setting will be remembered!"
https://darkmodejs.learn.uno/
"Add a dark-mode / night-mode to your website in a few seconds
This library uses the css mix-blend-mode in order to bring Dark-mode to any of your websites. Just copy paste the snippet and you will get a widget to turn on and off the dark-mode. You can also use it without the widget programmatically. The plugin is lightweight, built in VanillaJS. It also uses localstorage by default so your last setting will be remembered!"
This has to do with the readability. Overly black background will create sharp contrasts that can hurt eyes on the long run. I would prefer protecting my eyes over saving a few percentages of my battery as I cannot replace my eyes easily like replacing the battery on an iPad.
Eye strain is temporary. It never does permanent damage.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/EyeHealthNews/11-eye-myths-debunked/story?id=8919023
Even though eyes don't work the same way as ears, children should not use electronic devices extensively and long term computer exposure without proper rest could still lead to permanent eye damage.
And my point still stands: it is way more expensive to fix my eyes when I cannot see things clearly as it was before than to replace a bad iPad battery because dark mode does not work to save battery life.
Your point is based on a false assumption. Eye strain does not cause permanent damage.
In fact what might cause long term damage (the jury is still out) is long term exposure to blue light. Dark mode reduces blue light. So if anything, if you’re worried about the long term health of your eyesight, dark mode might be better.
There are expected battery savings with dark mode on OLED displays, I specified that. You brought up iPads.
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https://www.medicinenet.com/eye_strain/article.htm#is_it_possible_to_prevent_eye_strain
OK. I am wrong on this eye strain one, my bad. No permanent damage.
https://www.allaboutvision.com/cvs/blue-light.htm
Seems that there are researches regarding permanent damage to blue lights. But, I am skeptical that dark mode reduces blue light, as the pixel that is turned on may still emit blue light anyway. It may reduce the amount of blue light emitting from the screen, but then people are complaining about OLED causing eyes fatigue because of panels using PWM to drive the display. Maybe micro LED could Eliminate those problems.
I bring iPad because I am using iPad to respond to your comments. I know iPad does not have OLED screen as of yet, but for battery replacement analogy here, using iPad is ok.
What do you base that on? Are there peer reviewed studies that show a connection? There are countless medical bodies that state it does not cause permanent damage. If we’re working on hunches I might as well say we’re not sure yet but eye strain may cause bowel cancer (there probably is some crackpot somewhere in the depths of Facebook that’s claiming this).
I consider the blue light scenario differently because there is some discussion around this at the moment.
I would prefer to support current medical consensus from scientists that have spent their whole lives working in the field.
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Which you clearly haven't read, sure asthenopia alone won't cause irreversible ocular damage, however lets not forget musculoskeletal complications that can.
I'll do you one better, there is even a condition called "Computer Vision Syndrome/Digital Eye Strain", high prevalence too - not a zebra (unlike that transient smartphone blindness case amirite). Are we also ignoring RCTs examining digital vs paper readers?
As this is neurosci we are talking about, not ophthalmology you'll find the overall consensus to be "we are not yet sure". But, some agreement re detrimental effects of technology use on mental health, plus a tad covering dopamenergic associated impaired cognitive function, grey matter atrophy in the frontal lobe etc.
What we believed we knew about the brain is frequently rendered obsolete and at ever increasing rate, but I'm sure that those guys that experimented on unwilling subjects are the best to ask since they've been in the field the longest.
I am well aware dark mode forced into all websites don’t work and need to be disabled for a few. For example, there are some captchas that became invisible once I enabled dark mode from the iOS Firefox app. So I had to turn it off to see it. Also noticed that some blogs when you enable dark mode the text in italic or some sort of font or formatting also can’t be seen with dark mode, while all the rest of the text in said page is clearly visible.
Apparently dark mode (and this happens in all PC browsers, too) don’t work well depending on how the website was created. Of course this doesn’t happen with most of them, only a minority, but it could be reason enough why Apple hasn’t implemented in Safari. Besides dark mode is complex at least for PC browsers, with options I never saw in mobile. Just turning on and off doesn’t look the ideal scenario for me. Take a look at what options, for example, NIGHT MODE has for the PC Chrome extension.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/night-mode-pro/gbilbeoogenjmnabenfjfoockmpfnjoh
One of them is a whitelist, to exclude some websites from having it enabled. I don’t see such complexity added to any mobile browser.
Still I think they should have added this option to the Safari browser, at least in the experimental features list, because having dark mode in the entire system and not having in the main browser is a major downside. That is laziness to me.
Sadly most websites are always opting for a very bright and white background that we all know cause eye strain more than if other colors were used, because white background emits more light.
And to make matters worse the Firefox iOS app is now a mere shadow of what once was, with favorites hidden somehow, ever since the last updates the app became a lot worse, so I rarely use it anymore.
Apparently dark mode (and this happens in all PC browsers, too) don’t work well depending on how the website was created. Of course this doesn’t happen with most of them, only a minority, but it could be reason enough why Apple hasn’t implemented in Safari. Besides dark mode is complex at least for PC browsers, with options I never saw in mobile. Just turning on and off doesn’t look the ideal scenario for me. Take a look at what options, for example, NIGHT MODE has for the PC Chrome extension.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/night-mode-pro/gbilbeoogenjmnabenfjfoockmpfnjoh
One of them is a whitelist, to exclude some websites from having it enabled. I don’t see such complexity added to any mobile browser.
Still I think they should have added this option to the Safari browser, at least in the experimental features list, because having dark mode in the entire system and not having in the main browser is a major downside. That is laziness to me.
Sadly most websites are always opting for a very bright and white background that we all know cause eye strain more than if other colors were used, because white background emits more light.
And to make matters worse the Firefox iOS app is now a mere shadow of what once was, with favorites hidden somehow, ever since the last updates the app became a lot worse, so I rarely use it anymore.
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Firefox's night mode and other similar mode on iOS are not perfect because they essentially just invert colours but not images but if you look at some safari extensions on macOS like dark reader, you'll see they can do a very good job to bring everything dark.
With Dark reader, website will capture their real colours themes, only the bright backgrounds are reverted and site that are already dark is not reverted at all. Thats exactly what Apple should do and they can do this but they don't want to put some extra effort doing it.We all know that making an API to let devs integrate this on their website will be a failure because almost no one will really use it instead of making a true dark mode for safari.
At least if they dont want to, they could just allow extensions for iOS Safari and everyone would be happy.
For iOS and macOS? Or just iOS? If it's for both I'd buy it but if not I probably won't.