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Comment by Tallain | Hacker News Reader

I do wish there was more conversation around the levels of blackness for dark modes. Black screen and white text is physically painful for me. I usually have to resort to reader mode, or open up dev tools and change colors myself, to make a page like this readable for me.

I appreciate how hard it can be to make a good dark mode; I've spent months building a custom dark theme I term "mid-contrast". It's still WCAG compliant, but easy on my eyes, and I've stuck with the (maybe silly?) requirement of 16 colors only, like Solarized.

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I'm the opposite. Anything other than pure white on pure black for dark themes gives me eye strain. If you use the dark reader web extension you can adjust the brightness and contrast to your liking.

As it should be - the browser is termed a "user agent" for a reason. There should be browser settings for preferred dark (and light) colour schemes.

Actually - there are to a very small extent. But they are near useless, defining only the colours of uncoloured elements.

I don't like white text on a pure black background either, but for me the solution is to dim the text, not brighten the background. I can't stand the push away from allowing pure black for OLED devices based primarily on Google's design strategy. Though personally I don't want to force my specific preferences on everyone and instead think people should be able to configure it how it suits them best. That's all I want for myself.

there's a firefox (maybe chrome too) extension called dark reader

not only it wil dark-ify pages that don't support dark mode, it will alter the tone of dark mode pages to a more enjoyable (i like to add some pastel colors)

for dark mode pages that are already perfect, you can disable it on a per page basis

only trouble i had so far is that disabling or enabling happens per-site. so I can't have dark mode on google, disabling it on google maps

Pure black background with pure white elements is a common accessibility issue.

And just curious, why would using "only" 16 colors be silly?

Maybe silly is the wrong word. But sometimes I think I would make things easier on myself if I allowed some shade variants. It's good for me to keep the constraint though.

I've been spending some time creating a Visual Studio theme using this palette and the way that IDE uses colors is... less than great. Trying to find the right token to change is an exercise in madness, and many things that are visually the same in importance/hierarchy use very slightly different shades for some unknown reason.

Seems like "Reader Mode" ought to be the default for a user agent.

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