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Ask HN: What's your opinion on automatic light/dark mode switching on websites?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your opinion on automatic light/dark mode switching on websites?

#22

Post by mediumsmart »

I dont have an opinion - I make the site and if the user wants to print it out to view it with 3D glasses they have my blessing.

that being said the OS just switched to dark here because time of day and HN is still a nice bright white light at the end of the tunnel.

Re: Ask HN: What's your opinion on automatic light/dark mode switching on websites?

#23

Post by ksec »

ssivark wrote: post #14

Sometimes when I'm browsing at night, and have the OS/browser set to dark mode, it's really annoying when one website suddenly defaults to light mode instead of respecting my settings. The only thing more annoying is to have to do this repeatedly for multiple websites. In fact, when I'm working/browsing at night (without the lights) I enable an extension which will forcibly render all pages in dark mode, using some p…

This. It literally is like flash night when lights out and it is really annoying.

Re: Ask HN: What's your opinion on automatic light/dark mode switching on websites?

#25

Post by wruza »

bravetraveler wrote: post #15

Let users choose, don't require it. They've already expressed a preference... it might change depending on your style.

Tbh, the preference may work for one set of things but not for the other. It should be a per-app per-site setting with a system default. But not in-the-site, obviously.

This is not a realistic change though, cause systems and browsers vendors are absolutely deaf to this and don’t let users choose. In contrast to Dark Reader extension, which does the thing for all sites, light and dark.

Re: Ask HN: What's your opinion on automatic light/dark mode switching on websites?

#26

Post by bravetraveler »

wruza wrote: post #25
bravetraveler wrote: post #15

Let users choose, don't require it. They've already expressed a preference... it might change depending on your style.

Tbh, the preference may work for one set of things but not for the other. It should be a per-app per-site setting with a system default. But not in-the-site, obviously. This is not a realistic change though, cause systems and browsers vendors are absolutely deaf to this and don’t let users choose. In contrast to Dark Reader extension, which does the thing for all sites, light and dark.

I don't think I phrased this well, I agree. Things should follow what the system reports, but still permit switching should things not be suitable for whatever reason

Re: Ask HN: What's your opinion on automatic light/dark mode switching on websites?

#30

Post by throwaway519 »

me4502 wrote: post #7

IMO if a website supports both light & dark themes, it should _by default_ switch automatically. If the site wants to allow overriding that, that's fine, but I hate having to constantly go into the settings of sites to switch it to "Use System Default" instead of "Light theme". Especially when sites don't store the data very long, or it's a site like AzureDevOps/Jira/etc which is deployed across multiple instances an…

To add the counter: A website shold always have a manual control and not try to guess my timezone or preferences based around that. Since I typically use a device in well lit conditions and detest dark mode as it is, not having a manual switch for when things go wrong kicks off a bad experience.
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