Darkness is a browser extension that provides beautiful dark themes for popular websites such as Google, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, and dozens of others
I’ve tried various dark theme extensions. None so far have universally worked. The one I have installed just now (can’t remember the name but it was featured in PH a couple months ago) doesn’t work on google analytics or Mailchimp - for example.
Does this cover all bases?
Hi @mickc79, Darkness doesn't cover all bases either.
I believe there's a trade-off between supporting all websites, aesthetics, and performance.
Some extensions aim to darken all websites, which is great by itself, but unfortunately "automatic" dark theming which work by inverting and manipulating the colors on the screen often provides weird colors which is not aesthetic. Sometimes, when the algorithm needs to handle thousands of elements on the screen, it comes with a cost in terms of performance (pages could load and react slowly).
Darkness takes the opposite approach - instead of "automatically" darkening every website, it provides dark themes made and applied specifically for each website. The result is more intentional, and it also means that you can choose from various themes (Iceberg, Matrix green, Red alert), and there is no performance hit. We've been able to support about 25 websites so far: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, Google Photos, Inbox, Dropbox, Keep, Google Calendar, GitHub, Trello, StackOverflow, etc. but unfortunately, not all websites are supported.
So yeah, it's a trade-off between supporting more websites on the one hand, and providing better aesthetics and performance on the other hand. We choose the latter option
@liorgrossman totally get it. Thanks for explaining. I think the approach you’re taking is much better. I’m assuming more sites will be added as tine goes on. Maybe you could have basic themes for the main cluster of sites then sell more “packs” of sites ?
@mickc79 Yep, new sites are added regularly.
Currently, our most popular dark theme is available for free for Facebook and Google. We might expand that as Darkness grows.
Packs are actually an interesting idea! Never thought of that, thanks!
Too bad every site can't do this natively. I know it takes effort to make an entirely new colour scheme, but for the biggies out there they should just dedicate a few designers to it for a week or two and get it done.
And while they're at it also support macOS Dark Mode automatically so based on your current Dark Mode setting, it changes from light to dark mode. (Not even sure if that is accessible from the browser, but it should be.)
@joshuapinter Yep. Seems like many website don't want the hassle of having to deal with more than one color scheme. It does make sense to me, as this could increase the time to develop (and test) each new component or feature added to the website.
One of the reasons we made Darkness open source is to allow designers and developers to easily create a skin for their favorite website. We built all the boilerplate so building a new skin is as easy as possible.
Re detecting macOS Dark Mode - that's a wonderful idea! Need to figure out how to do it.
Thanks for the hunt, @benln
Hi everyone! I’m Lior, the founder of Darkness.
Darkness is a browser extension that provides beautiful dark themes for popular websites such as Google and Facebook.
Aside from looking cool, dark themes have real benefits: reducing eye strain and fatigue, eliminating glare at night, and improving sleep quality.
Today we’re glad to introduce Darkness v2, which takes dark themes to the next level:
✔ Support for over 20 websites: YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, Google Keep, Google Calendar, Reddit, Dropbox, GitHub, Trello, StackOverflow, Inbox and others
✔ 7 different dark color themes to choose from: Iceberg, Tomorrow, Material Design, Dusk, Red Alert, Coffee, and The Matrix
✔ New simplified user-interface
✔ Firefox add-on (in addition to the Chrome extension)
Darkness comes in 2 flavors which you may choose from:
1. Darkness open source - self-hosted. All functionality, websites and skins are 100% free to use, pull requests are welcome! https://github.com/liorgrossman/...
2. Darkness freemium - downloadable from Chrome or Firefox stores:
https://chrome.google.com/websto...https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US...
This free version offers a dark theme for Google and Facebook for free. By upgrading to Pro (one time $5 payment via PayPal) you can enjoy 7 skins on all 20+ supported website. Obviously, Darkness lets you try those skins before upgrading.
We’ve reached over 100K users with Darkness v1, I can’t wait to see how far we get with Darkness v2.
Give it a try and let me know what you think, I’d be happy to answer your questions.
Cheers,
Lior
It's really useful and great, it would be better if it had support for more websites and support to use custom colors to create a theme. Even then, it's really good as it is now.
Pros:
Really cool! Has a ton of themes and it's easy to use
Cons:
None
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I think it is good enough but maybe it will be better to try to switch Youtube to dark mode without using any extensions. I like the original dark theme. It is not so hard. You cna find the guide here https://rocketfiles.com/articles.... I do not know what browser you use.
@mickc79 Safari support is not planned at the moment, sorry.
Initially we only had a Chrome extension, then based on popular demand we've ported it to Firefox.
I assume if there will be enough demand, we'll port it to Safari too, but we haven't got many requests for that so far.
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It's really useful and great, it would be better if it had support for more websites and support to use custom colors to create a theme. Even then, it's really good as it is now.
Pros:Really cool! Has a ton of themes and it's easy to use
Cons:None
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