Get Dark Mode on Chrome, Edge, Safari & Firefox

Ashlin Asokan — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 21:04:00 +0000

Are you tired of using browsers in the normal mode? Or you don’t link the white screen of your browser. You can simply switch to dark mode on your browser and change the things.

What is Dark mode?

Dark mode, Dark theme, Black mode, or Night mode is a type of Light-on-dark colour scheme. In this mode, the texts, icons, and GUI are in white while the background is either black or grey. The dark mode is a trend nowadays. The dark mode is not something that is developed recently. It was there since the dawn of computers, well it was not called dark mode at that time, it was used in terminals and it was used by technical developers in their code editors. But the craze for dark mode, that we know today, began in late-2018 and mid-2019 because of the advantages of dark mode that came to light. We’ll talk about them in the next topic.

Reasons to Switch to the dark mode

This is a very controversial topic nowadays. Well, I’ll try to explain.

Since most of the screen when using a dark mode is black, in an OLED display, it can help conserve battery, and in the case of computers, energy. Because in OLED screens the pixels with black colour don’t light up and hence the use less energy overall. Note: This advantage is only there for OLED screens and not for LCD panels.
It can reduce the amount of strain on your eyes. This is a very common problem among people whose works revolve around screens. Having your eyes glued to a screen for an extended period can make your eyes hurt and, in some cases, also induce headaches. So, using Dark mode can definitely help.
It protects your eyes from blue light. Excess of blue light can damage light-sensitive cells inside our eyes, which can later lead to symptoms like macular degeneration and ultimately lead to permanent vision loss. Blue light has a very short wavelength and it scatters very easily. This is the reason why a cloudless sky looks blue. Let me put it this way, Blue light is a necessary evil. It’s both good and bad. Sun is the main source of blue light. And the amount of blue light emitted by screens is just a fraction of what Sun emits. But the amount of time people spend on screens nowadays is so much that even that fraction is considerable enough to damage your eyes. Keep in mind that blue light is not always bad, it offers its own advantages. In fact, you should take in blue light in the daytime. It is needed for good health; it improves alertness, memory; it lifts mood, etc. But blue light at night is harmful. So, summarizing everything, you should consider using dark mode at night.

Ok, so now we will jump right to the principal topic.

How to Enable Dark Mode in Browsers?

You can enable Dark mode for almost every website you visit, using Dark Reader. It is free; it is open source and it is ad-free as well. It inverts all the colors of the page except for the images. You can easily toggle it on or off using shortcut Alt+Shift+D. You can also set brightness, contrast, and a couple of other filters according to your taste. Like Sepia which gives the website a yellowish effect and hence reduces blue light more effectively. It offers four types of Dark modes. You can also add custom preferences, I mean you can make a list of websites in which you want dark mode and a list of websites in which you don’t.

In Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge it is an Extension that you can add on. But for Safari you will have to download its app from the App Store and activate it from there. I’ll add all the links below.

For Chrome: Download

For Firefox: Download

For Microsoft Edge: Download

For Safari: Download