On the other hand, the "bright mode" is great in my office which has three massive windows. (I don't have some awesome corner office. I work in a loft space with 4 other designer/developers and one end of the room has three floor-to-14-foot-ceiling windows.)
regarding the standard version of the page, me and my eyes think that the blue-like color is not the best choice combined with the much smoother gray tones.
all told, I pretty much like the idea and the realization as a whole. keep it up!
To alleviate it somewhat you could make the tab changes AJAXy, or serve a different CSS file based on the choice .. or if you didn't want to persist user information server-side a nice compromise could be making the page bg colour #888 and then explicitly set up or down in the JS.