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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

The article itself concluded this:

> Please, for the love of all that is good and decent in this world, the next time you force a visual change upon users, include a colour picker option to let the user override your choices, or, you know, respect the system theme.

Ironically, the article itself displays with hardcoded white-on-black text and neither 1. allows me to override its choices nor 2. respects my system theme. I have to "Disable Styles" in my browser to accomplish this.

I wish app and web developers would be more respectful of user's style preferences and their system theme. Some designer living 1000 miles away in Silicon Valley should not be able to simply dictate how my browser displays text or what color my application windows are.

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Older web browsers used to let you override the colors for all websites as just a normal setting. I think I'm specifically remembering Netscape 3, but it's been a while. I used to override the colors, and disable images/js from like 96-99, and everything worked fine. I still miss that version of the web

The ability for users to override styling was one of the original design goals of CSS; https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/#abstract:

"One of the fundamental features of CSS is that style sheets cascade; authors can attach a preferred style sheet, while the reader may have a personal style sheet to adjust for human or technological handicaps."

Safari still supports this. Preferences -> Advanced -> Style sheet. I use it to adjust things on some websites. As far as I know Chrome does not support it. Firefox probably supports it, but their preferences UI has always been terrible so I can’t figure out where it would be.

Firefox probably supports it, but their preferences UI has always been terrible so I can’t figure out where it would be.

I remember it being nicer about 20 years ago, I think it started getting gradually worse about the same time the release numbers started increasing like crazy.

Firefox still does: Settings -> General -> Colors. You can change the default color for text/background/links, and set it to always override the website's styling if you want.

> neither 1. allows me to override its choices

What makes you feel like it doesn't allow you to override its styles? Unless it's doing some funny business with e.g. the shadow DOM, you can literally just add some CSS in your browser – the exact ease that this blog author was wishing for:

    * { background: white; color: black !important; }

The standard way would be to respect prefers-color-scheme (rather than make the user do something specific for your site).

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

That would be GP's second point, "respects my system theme."

I'm not a web developer, but looking at "prefers-color-scheme," that seems like a good, but very tiny step in the right direction. I'd consider my system theme to be more than just binary "dark" vs. "light". What about font, text size, specific colors and appearance for content and UI controls, colors and fonts for link text, and so on. As a user, I shouldn't need to inject CSS, fart around with Greasemonkey scripts, or use the big hammer "Disable CSS," just to force my browser into respecting user preferences.

> I wish app and web developers would be more respectful of user's style preferences and their system theme.

The problem for app developers is that there are so many completely different implementations of theming in platforms. On Windows, you have the Win95 era legacy theming (color schemes, fonts and window framing), like five or six different UI frameworks that may or may not integrate with the legacy settings, and on top of that the entire DPI settings which many app developers don't bother to test. On Linux, you have the big players KDE and Gnome and a truckload of splintered smaller projects. On macOS and iOS, you don't have anything but dark mode. On Android, you have dark mode and fonts. On web, you don't have anything but dark mode (and I wonder if that's going to be taken away like a million other things that got exploited to fingerprint users!). Oh and you have Java frameworks that have the same limitation.

And depending which kind of framework you use, it may or may not well integrate with whatever implementation the OS provides.

> On web, you don't have anything.

Well, you have at least prefers-color-scheme CSS media feature, but maybe you can also use System Colors: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/color_value...

Remember when web pages were text with a few images, with browser settings (font/size/color?) that let users style things to suit their own needs? Those were good days.

With respect to colors, at least, if you use the system ones for whatever UI framework you're using, it'll be good enough if not perfect.

I thought for most application frameworks, simply not doing anything is enough to make your application adopt the user's system preferences. You have to take deliberate action as a developer to override them.

I remember the early days of Windows 95, where for a brief, glorious moment in time, all your applications would look like proper Windows 95 applications, respecting your color scheme, text size and font face, highlight/disable behavior, tooltip/hover behavior and colors, everything. Everything you launched just looked like it fit in with the rest of the system. Then, I think one of the first (at least most prominent) egregious violators was WinAmp. You'd launch it and it just decided by itself what the title bar, status bar, min/max/close buttons, content, everything, should look like. And not just colors--they used bitmap graphics to entirely override what common controls looked like. It stuck out on your desktop like a sore thumb. Yuck! If you wanted to change its appearance, you had to use the application's own plugin or theming system since it just ignored the system.

Fast forward to today, and every developer just treats the application's entire visual surface as their own art project, basically ignoring the system preferences altogether. If you're lucky, they let you specify "dark" vs. "light" or even more rarely, let you go in and do minor tweaks using the app's own bespoke preference settings. But fallback to system colors? Fuggetaboutit!

All self-respectable browsers have a "reader mode" that does what you want. You don't have to hack away at obscure options, it's one button click away.

Chrome is the browser that doesn't have a reader mode by default, due to the obvious conflict of interest.

To be fair, greasemonkey still works and I just overlay my own scripts to sites I visit often.

Cant say that of windows apps so...

I've got some nice tricks in my userContent.css file, I couldn't imaging using a browser that does not support it.

It's also the first blog post I've seen in a long time that put up a javascript error.

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