Reading comfortably with inverted brightness but preserved hue
This extension eases your eyes by inverting the brightness of every webpage you browse.
The majority of websites mainly use very light colors, but some already have a refreshing dark theme. For these the user can disable the domain, essentially setting it on a blacklist of the application.
Its goal is, in contrast to the approach of creating new webpage–specific templates, to be as general as possible. This is best achieved by applying the CSS filter invert to the document root, because it inverts the whole area in one swoop after it got rendered normally instead of going through every element. This is even more efficient because CSS filters rely on the browser implementation, meaning all the good stuff like hardware acceleration or other system specific optimizations.
Images should still show normally, but single elements cannot be excluded from the filter. This is no problem, since they can just get inverted on their own before the whole document gets inverted, reverting the images to their original color.
To preserve the visual appearance of websites which may be iconic like the blue theme of Facebook, another filter is applied that rotates the hue back by 180 degrees. However, due to certain limitations of the RGB color model, very saturated colors get clipped in their value component that would have to exceed the maximum, resulting in occasional weird–looking images after they got reverted. Where an exact representation is needed, the hue–rotation can be disabled.
[TODO]
more ideas to be implemented in future releases are:
— serve options page to input custom CSS rules to optimize other websites
— friendly ui for options page (e.g. click [+] to add a rule, specify the case e.g. as regex, input CSS to be applied into text field)
— keyboard shortcuts for enabling/disabling on domain and more
— (maybe) make only–invert option domain specific
— (maybe) optionally stop inverting input text fields
— (do YOU have an idea? contact me!)
[KNOWN BUGS]
— (confirmed for Chrome) Prints get heavily pixelated when NightReader is enabled (even with "enabled globally" unchecked). There might be a possible fix in a future Version.
Workaround: disable Extension for printing
[CHANGELOG]
[Version 1.7.41]
fix for changed Twitter CSS
improvements and tweaks for YouTube, Twitch, Twitch Beta, Wikipedia, TED and Bandcamp
[Version 1.7.4]
made popup visually respond like websites (bg + css filter)
adjustment for new YT theme (and other domains)
updated preset blacklist
[Version 1.7.3]
Updated predefined custom rules for twitch.tv (not inverting the dark theme)
added predefined custom rules for bandcamp.com
[Version 1.7.2]
Fixed/improved some of the predefined custom rules
added message encouraging feedback
[Version 1.7.1]
Bugfix: extension won't install because options page (WIP) was referenced but not found because it got excluded when packing extension
[Version 1.7]
First public release of Night Reader
Working:
- inverting webpages via css filter at earliest possible stage (when loading a webpage)
- inverting images etc. back to display normally
- hue-rotating by 180 deg to achieve a brightness invert effect/preserving hues to keep the visual appearence as close to the original as possible
- global quick extension disable switch
- domain based blacklist managed by user
- hidden CSS rules to further enhace and smoothen some features of a couple of popular websites like Facebook and Twitter
- hue-rotation disable switch as workaround for loss of color information with very saturated colors
Latest reviews
- (2023-02-21) pipe 4545: estuve buscando una extensión que sirviera con Duolingo, y de las que probé esta es la única que si sirve bien.
- (2022-12-09) tellfile: I almost gave up looking for a dark page addon until I found this one. This one gave thought to actually being able to see the text well, while all the other ones had the text too grayish dim, and any blue text too dark to even read against that black background. What was they thinking. This one is the best. Long live it.
- (2022-10-25) Maria Mason: This extension is so henky. Sometimes it works (rarely) but most of time it does not. I have tried reloading. Using the rotate option etc but nothing works any longer. It did a few times. Removing it today.
- (2022-10-05) Samer Ben hamed: Exactly what I was looking for: dark mode for any webpage.
- (2022-01-19) Keehan Koorn: This is the best reading experience I've had with a dark mode chrome extension. My only concern is that I have to accept that the app will read all of my browsing data in order for it to work, and there is no statement regarding privacy by the developer. Unfortunately I can't seem to reach the developer directly to ask about it.
- (2021-12-22) Eider Colen: Funciona na maior parte dos sites, cumpre o que promete, se o site for branco inverte e fica escuro kk
- (2021-01-26) Slyack: One of few dark mode addons that work perfectly. Good job!
- (2020-09-04) B Noratto: estaría bien incluir un botón de encendido, para poder manipularla, sreo que sería lo óptimo...
- (2020-06-24) Misc Carta: I really like it. It gives me an option to customize each site or window I open up. I tried a few other with much higher users' rating but nothing is good as this one. Thank you.
- (2020-03-04) Marcos: Exactly what you expect. It really gives a much more comfortable reading experience. Thanks a lot.
- (2019-11-19) Scott C: I've used this for 2 minutes and it appropriately flips colors to dark-mode on all my favorite sites. Well done.
- (2019-11-03) Faiad Sharif: This is really good. The only thing to improve is that it doesn't work when viewing pdfs.
- (2019-09-10) SHAAH HAMEED: It works on Google pages incl Google images Replaced Dark theme for Google and another chrome extension Very underrated
- (2019-05-21) Kurtis Collins: would not darken my padges did not work
- (2019-05-07) Mohit G: Really like this extension. I find it very useful for most of the sites. I want to make some feature requests: 1. Ability to import/export site settings. 2. Ability to apply dark effect to selected elements on page. 3. Better application on images (to prevent them from getting inverted).
- (2019-01-30) Wasabi: Been jumping around different dark mode extensions and so far this is the only one that has been working on all of my work sites without breaking anything. Amazing job on this!
- (2019-01-13) Ânn: What a wonderful extension! Really love it!
- (2018-10-16) Luca Bravi: Very good job, Patrick! Many thanks, Luca.
- (2018-09-28) x re: pretty good
- (2018-09-23) Rodrigo A. Cruz: Me gustaría que también funcionara en la página inicial de Chrome. Por lo demás, es la mejor que he probado!
- (2018-08-04) Am I empTEA: Ну опять, инверсит все подряд, и картинки и видео -_-
- (2018-07-30) Piotr Kołodziejski: Próbowałem Dark Reader, Stylus i Tempermonkey, ale w każdym przypadku miałem jakieś "ale". Np. niedziałająca wtyczka Pinterest, zepsute obrazki na stronach, pokitfaszone menu, za dużo skomplikowanej konfiguracji. NIGHT READER jest prosty, szybki i przez to skuteczny. Polecam!
- (2018-07-09) J D: Like said, it'd be nice if there was a hotkey for on and off, other than that it's probably the best one available in the whole store so 100% recommended.
- (2018-05-26) Marcus Otterström: Great job, works perfectly with Google docs, drive & presentations. The actual presentation images look exactly the same, but the sides are dark, just like you want it to be. Other extensions invert all the colors, which makes your entire presentation looks weird. Thanks a lot for this! <3
- (2018-03-19) Mike Costello: very good and useful <3
- (2017-11-15) 王佳欣: very nice, I use it for firefox and chrome!
- (2017-08-11) 1 0: If you can set the color reversal on / off hotkey, this program will be perfect