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Comment by johnthuss | Hacker News Reader

Having the web site match the site's (dark) theme to the browser's (dark) theme is a feature, not a bug. If you are using a dark theme in your OS or browser, the web site can assume you'd prefer to match that as the default. But providing a way to opt out would be nice too.

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Personally, I don't want a web site to know whether I have dark-mode enabled or not; just one more fingerprint. Would they? Or is it just how the browser displays the content?

The website does know: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

Thanks.

A side effect of enabling "privacy.resistFingerprinting" in Firefox (enabled by default in Tor Browser). is that it always prefers light mode.

Seems like this is a missing browser feature. Maybe there's some extension for overriding the dark theme setting exposed to websites.

https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader (I'm just a happy user)

Well, the web-site is wrong if it assumes I'd prefer everything to be dark, not only UI. This is one of the examples of absence of empathy and wrong conclusion about human behaviour by some coder.

> This is one of the examples of absence of empathy

Isn't this an example of an abundance of empathy? If the user has requested dark-mode, websites responding with their best version of a dark-mode experience is an example of user empathy in action.

I operate in dark-mode 24/7 myself, and I've been pleasantly surprised at websites slowly supporting a dark-mode experience and automatically showing that by default.

There should probably be a one-click "override dark/light mode on this site" button somewhere, so that you don't have to dig into your OS to change it back. But the defaults here seem like the most reasonable, most user-respecting thing that could possibly exist.

No. When someone forces on everybody else own understanding of the world regardless of what other people want that's an absence. Not forcing own defaults and giving a choice—that would be more preferrable.

>>When someone forces on everybody else own understanding of the world regardless of what other people want that's an absence.

That is literally what you are proposing though. That website creators should force their creation on everyone else and even though the user has clearly signalled that they want to be in dark mode, they should disregard this preference.

Picking dark mode is a choice, and websites should respect that choice and adapt to it. Not doing so is "forcing on everyone else your understanding of the world".

Standard default usually means light. Changing this to dark means forcing new default. Since there is a browser limitation in telling exactly what a user wants—dark UI and light content or dark UI and dark content—forcing a new default considering that it's exactly what a user wants just based oninformation about UI despite the fact that there are not enough signals is a bit wrong. The safer bet would be to provide a choice but keep defaults to general (light) and not make choice for a user just judging by UI theme.

>>Changing this to dark means forcing new default.

No one is changing the default. Websites are merely respecting YOUR choice.

>>The safer bet would be to provide a choice but keep defaults to general (light)

This is literally how this works already - default is light theme, changing it to dark theme is a choice - I still don't understand what your issue here is.

>>web-site is wrong if it assumes I'd prefer everything to be dark, not only UI

Uhm, no? It's the exact opposite. Nothing worse that opening a website in the middle of the night and it burns your retinas because it has pure white background. I have a dark theme on everything, of course the website should adapt. What's the point of dynamic web otherwise?

Some people use computers in the middle of the day and don't want to stare at dark web-sites though.

Then those people can choose a light theme, it's all about your choice as a user.

> the web-site is wrong

How is the website supposed to know you prefer the content to be light but the UI to be dark?

The web-site should not suppose anything. It'd better not change defaults at all and deliver conventional colors. If it offers an optional switch to change theme to dark that would be appreciated. But not the fact that it makes and force choice for a user who didn't ask for it.

The website isn't supposing anything. The browser is supposing that you want the dark version of the website because you are in the system dark mode.

Why should this be different from say view scale? Should a website override the user's zoom level and render tiny fonts because it wants to? It doesn't, because the browser tells it what scale to use. Same with light/dark modes. Your issue is that your browser doesn't let you configure this one setting, not that every single website on the entire internet doesn't implement what you want.

The website doesn't know what your other UI looks like, it only knows whether you requested dark mode in your browser. Feel free to change your browser settings.

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