171–180 of 191 posts
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It's OS-level. macOS, iOS, Android, and I believe Windows 10 will all send this signal now to whichever (modern) browser you're using.
As will Linux/Gnome.
I love dark mode as a user, but as a developer it terrifies me how much complexity is involved in programming in 2019. At a stroke, it doubles the number of possible combinations of: - 2 device sizes: desktop vs mobile (e.g. responsive) - 3 platforms: web vs iOS vs Android, or web vs Windows vs macOS vs Linux (not even counting cross-browser or OS version quirks), or god forbid all of the above - 2 input methods: hov…
Shouldn’t the color scheme be orthogonal to input methods, platforms, and device sizes? I can’t think of any times I have changed colors specifically for any of those things.
Or use the same dark colors for mobile-size and desktop-size in responsive, but still need to test it to make sure I got all the s that appear in mobile-size but get hidden and/or replaced by other s in desktop-size and vice-versa.
Or discover we thought we'd covered everything, but when you use the normally-touch interface with a trackpad on Chromebooks, the default hover state is still light-mode.
Etc.
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Imagine: the original idea used to be you'd just supply a reasonably-marked-up document and maybe some formatting suggestions and the browser/user would pick the colors and fonts and such.
And those browser set styles were disgusting so people decided to just style everything themselves
I think it was a bad choice on the browsers' part. It's a totally abdication of the browser's responsibility to render things nicely and configurably for the user. Worse, javascript is bundled malware: you're letting websites execute arbitrary code on the user's machine.
Tracking, terrible website accessibility, and various dark patterns are a direct result of this. Instead of forcing websites to conform to a document format and giving users control over how that document behaves and is rendered, browsers given those powers to websites, and unsurprisingly, this has resulted in user-hostile behaviors. And it's not all peachy for websites either: websites can do a lot more with CSS/JS, but websites also have to do a lot more.
One of my side projects is a web browser which accepts various document types (i.e. image, slide show, article, login form) and renders them. Style/behavior is configurable by the user when possible, but the site serving the document has no control over styling/behavior--they only get to serve up documents which conform to the semantics of the document type. I doubt this will ever take off, but it's been an interesting and fun project so far.
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Did this about six months ago over at my site. Was annoying to get it right but glad I did. Some people find these kinds of sites pointless these days, but I enjoy keeping one even if I rarely update it anymore. Spirit of the web and all that. https://rymc.io/
Irrelevant but I wanted to thank you for the Old Reddit extension for Safari. That makes Reddit somewhat bearable again, although it still seems to lag while it loads their stupid new UI before doing the redirect (not sure if there's any way to avoid that).
Sadly Safari's API isn't that great compared to those found in Chrome/Firefox; there's no way to catch the url before the page actually loads. I inject some JS to catch and redirect as fast as possible, but sometimes you'll see a flash of the new Reddit experience. If a better API becomes available at some point I'd gladly swap it out. :)
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Conversely, that's what's amazing about the Web, right? Whenever people introduce any of those things, like when iOS was introduced, they had to decide how to port all the existing content and interactions and widgets to mobile and touch interfaces. As a result, if an entrepreneur or hobbyist makes an app on one platform and wants it to be at least minimally usable on another platform, the Web way, way lowers the bar…
The particular methods for making CSS backwards compatible are specific to the web, but the general problems faced by having user display preferences are not. Adding these features to native apps blows up your testing matrix there, too. In many ways, it's even worse. I've got OS settings here for "increase contrast", "reduce transparency", "use grayscale", "invert colors", and (because areas of native windows can be…
Doubtless many, many other apps have also made that same mistake, yet I highly doubt it has made the difference between success and failure for even a single one of them.
All of those OS features were introduced to help people, because people wanted them, some even needed them. I don't think we live in a worse world for having them, and I believe that dealing with features like those would actually be even harder in a world without the Web.
I apologize for my ignorance, but could somebody explain the need for dark mode? I know that it's bad to have a phone glow in your face when your eyes are adjusted to the dark, but don't most phones automatically lower the brightness? That seems to work well enough for me. Perhaps a specific dark mode could do it better, if well designed, but most sites have a hard enough time doing one good color scheme. I know some…
One of my (maybe unwarranted) concern with automatic dark mode, is the potential ability of the browser and apps to determine my (very) coarse location based on when the dark mode is enabled or not, as it because another potentially identifying info among others. Does that kind of CSS allows a script to determine if the browser is displaying dark mode or not, or send back that information to ads servers?
Try accomdating for Dark Mode as an email developer...
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As will Linux/Gnome.
Any idea how to set this on Ubuntu? I have what I assume is the dark theme - title bars are white text on dark grey background - but this website displays a light theme in Firefox.
You can also force Firefox, via an about:config setting to act as if you were using dark mode.