4 ms·

Dark Mode Toggles Should Be a Browser Feature

17 points by tagawa 4y ago

secretsatan 4y ago
I was going to say it should respect the system setting. Apparently that’s a problem. But personally, i find it irritating if something can, but doesn’t respect my system setting, and i personally fought to not include such a toggle on an iOS app. At least on iOS, if you set things up correctly, it’s easy to support the system setting, and implementing a toggle makes things harder but i am not a web developer, so won’t comment on the problems there. I’ll add that on iOS, you can add the light/dark toggle to that drop down from the top right drag down menu. In most cases, i use dark mode anyway, i find the need to change the mode because something looks terrible in one mode or the other to be few and far between, but sometimes, i like to work outside, and just switch to light mode. And if i have to find another toggle because something didn’t respect that, it is irritating
- atoav 4y ago
  To be honest, I like the ability to override the darkmode setting of an app. I want certain apps to be bright sometimes, without having to switch the whole system.
  - CamelRocketFish 4y ago
    I agree. In all my apps, I provide 3 settings; system, dark and light with the default option being system.
winrid 4y ago
We'll probably get a "dark mode" DOM event at some point, if there isn't already.
- mgrandl 4y ago
  There is. You can listen to media query changes. So listening to prefers-color-scheme already works quite nicely and I use it in my current project.
  - winrid 4y ago
    oh neat. I'll have to see if it propagates to iframes, if so I can update FastComments since it supports dark mode.
  - atom_arranger 4y ago
    Browsers should implement setting the preferred scheme per site at some point. It would also be interesting if they could support more than just light and dark.
    - mgrandl 4y ago
      Boy I really hope so. As it stands a lot of people implement their own toggles and only use „prefers-color-scheme“ for the initial setting of the theme. Using the plain media query everywhere would be much preferable and actually reduce the amount of CSS needed by a fair amount.
Cloudef 4y ago
But fingerprinting
lawgimenez 4y ago
Firefox for iOS has this feature and it was my favorite. I can toggle HN to dark mode too.

17 points by tagawa 4y ago

I was going to say it should respect the system setting. Apparently that’s a problem. But personally, i find it irritating if something can, but doesn’t respect my system setting, and i personally fought to not include such a toggle on an iOS app. At least on iOS, if you set things up correctly, it’s easy to support the system setting, and implementing a toggle makes things harder but i am not a web developer, so won’t comment on the problems there. I’ll add that on iOS, you can add the light/dark toggle to that drop down from the top right drag down menu. In most cases, i use dark mode anyway, i find the need to change the mode because something looks terrible in one mode or the other to be few and far between, but sometimes, i like to work outside, and just switch to light mode. And if i have to find another toggle because something didn’t respect that, it is irritating

atoav 4y ago
To be honest, I like the ability to override the darkmode setting of an app. I want certain apps to be bright sometimes, without having to switch the whole system.
- CamelRocketFish 4y ago
  I agree. In all my apps, I provide 3 settings; system, dark and light with the default option being system.

winrid 4y ago

We'll probably get a "dark mode" DOM event at some point, if there isn't already.

mgrandl 4y ago
There is. You can listen to media query changes. So listening to prefers-color-scheme already works quite nicely and I use it in my current project.
- winrid 4y ago
  oh neat. I'll have to see if it propagates to iframes, if so I can update FastComments since it supports dark mode.
- atom_arranger 4y ago
  Browsers should implement setting the preferred scheme per site at some point. It would also be interesting if they could support more than just light and dark.
  - mgrandl 4y ago
    Boy I really hope so. As it stands a lot of people implement their own toggles and only use „prefers-color-scheme“ for the initial setting of the theme. Using the plain media query everywhere would be much preferable and actually reduce the amount of CSS needed by a fair amount.

Cloudef 4y ago

But fingerprinting

lawgimenez 4y ago

Firefox for iOS has this feature and it was my favorite. I can toggle HN to dark mode too.