Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

> ...it is a best practice to allow users to manually toggle the color-scheme as well.

> Some people prefer a dark system theme, but light website themes, and vice-versa.

Is this common? Why don't those people configure their browser to use a light theme? Or if they prefer different websites to be different themes, use a browser plugin?

...a more general issue is that every website has to re-implement many things. It's a small issue, but it discourages newcomers, and the redundancy on every website adds up. Ideally, a site should look decent with no CSS, but in order to support legacy sites (a good thing) the default styles are the legacy ones (a bad thing); keeping what even back then would probably be considered "bugs" (except, like how crimes become legal, they managed to become "features" by being discovered too late), such as large images causing horizontal overflow. Honestly, is there a single good reason to make the default font Times New Roman 16px?

Browsers _should_ have been set up to allow per-site toggling of the dark mode CSS preference, much like how they allow per-site zooming.

Configuring the whole browser to have a light theme is the wrong solution - some websites look better in dark mode and some look better in light mode. Also, the browser setting also affects the UI of the browser itself, not just website contents.

These are of course solvable problems, but the most obvious and trivial way to handle this is just to store an extra flag per-website in the same place as the zoom preference.

Obligatory "there is a way, it's just that your browser refuses to implement it".

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

Is that persistent? As in, if I select a style sheet for a website, will it use that same style sheet if I reload the website or navigate back at a later date? Browsers do this all the time with zoom levels, but it would be really useful for much more than that.

Firefox does not remember it sadly.

Browser extension that do that require full access to the contents of the website. That’s why some people decide not to use those extension.

It’s been a while since i mucked around with browser extensions, but i assume they don’t have network access by default. Surely there is an extension with page read access and without network access, no?

Edit: this looks pretty harmless https://github.com/the-code-rider/dark-theme-extension/blob/...

Browser extensions that modify webpages are just javascript code injected in the page; They can definitely access the internet.

I don’t think that’s an accurate description of browser extensions. Content scripts work that way, and many browser extensions include content scripts… but not all browser extensions use content scripts.

Anyway, a quick readthru of the code of the extension i linked shows it does use content scripts, but also it doesn’t do any network access.

If I want to use an extension that needs full permissions on sensitive websites, I just download it and install it manually after looking at the source code. I rarely have to update them, and I'm not worried about future injections at that point.

Listen to this guy defend trash web browsers to support google! Tell me more about how traditional forums are unacceptable and your daddy with billions for shareholders but not customers has the right idea.

I prefer light at day and dark at night. I have scheduler that turns on OS like that and all other stuff follows (e.g. apps with auto setting and browser with dark reader).

This is particularly important on mobile, as dark is very reflective at day, and light blinds you at night.

I think the default styles are OK; I do not think they are so bad as some people say. However, the thing I would add (for web pages that have pictures) would be:

  img { max-width: 100%; }

(which is one of the things mentioned in that article; it probably would make sense for videos and SVG as well like they mention.) But, if you don't like them, the user should be allowed to customize them. In case this causes problems with web pages that use different styles that interfere with them, then hopefully an attribute could be added to specify that the user's CSS should be used instead of this one (and in some cases the browser might be able to decide this automatically for when the web page does not specify this attribute, e.g. if the styles are only associated with media queries and HTML element names rather than IDs, classes, etc). The user could still override this to disable the web page's CSS entirely if desired, but this would make it possible to specify that the web page's CSS is not needed for styling classes and other more complicated stuff within the specific web page or web app. (If the user does not define their own CSS, then it would use that defined in the web page (or the defaults if there is no CSS in the web page; the defaults probably should be changed to support the light/dark scheme properly for web pages that lack CSS, though), and the hypothetical attribute that I mentioned would be ignored.)

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