Best "dark" extension for Safari

By mr grieves, 30 November, 2019

Forum
Low Vision Accessibility on Apple Products

I used Dark Reader for Chrome-based browsers and Dark Text and LIght Background for Firefox, but on Safari it seems like there is a lack of free options available.

I see Dark Reader has a paid-for version on Safari, but it looks a little limited. I've tried Night Eye as it has a demo, and it's pretty good but it's also more expensive than any other option.

I don't use Safari much because of this, but if there was a free or cheap option that made it usable for me then I might like to use it from time to time.

I'm just wondering if anyone on here has experience with them?

Options

Comments

By Isabelle on Saturday, December 21, 2019 - 17:44

Is Night Eye only available on the Mac? I ask because I could not find it on the IOS App Store unfortunately. I am looking for a potential solution to this myself as well.

By mr grieves on Saturday, December 21, 2019 - 17:44

As far as I know, you can't do anything like this on iOS because of the closed-nature of the system (don't think apple would allow 3rd party extensions). There is "smart invert" as a feature which is supposed ot provide some sort of inverting of the colours. I asked about this here: https://www.applevis.com/forum/smart-invert-vs-dark-browser-extensions and it sounds like it's maybe not so good.

It's frustrating as it's the only thing stopping me jumping ship from Android.

By PaulMartz on Saturday, December 21, 2019 - 17:44

I put off upgrading to Catalina until Saturday as I had project keeping me busy through October and November. Once I upgraded, I wanted to try dark mode (again) and see if it was more usable than under Mojave.

Disappointed to discover that Safari still lacked dark mode support, I addded Dark Mode for Safari for $1.99 from the App Store. It worked in my limited testing.

It turns out I was using far too many programs that didn't fully support dark mode, including MultiMarkdown Composer and Apple's own Script Editor and Pages programs. For this reason, dark mode was unusable. I switched to using invert colors in classic mode. Classic mode enables me to invert images and screen shots that contain dark text on a light background.

Dark mode has received a lot of attention, but nothing beats the classic tried-and-true invert colors, in my opinion.

By mr grieves on Saturday, December 21, 2019 - 17:44

Thanks, I might give Dark Reader a go as I use it in Vivaldi etc and it works pretty well on the whole and it's much cheaper than Night Eyes.

I think the success you have with dark mode does depend a lot on the programs you use. For me, html emails are the main thing that gives me trouble on the mac.

I noticed a while ago that Opera Mobile for Android (not iOS sadly) has a night mode built into it, and it's been working brilliantly for me, even better than the Firefox extension I used before.

Opera do an iOS app, but it doesn't support this mode yet as far as I know. I know it's a different beast to get around the restrictions in iOS, but it's probably worth keeping an eye on it as it doesn't feel out of the realms of possibility.

By ablindview on Saturday, November 21, 2020 - 17:44

I use Dark Mode for Safari and have found it works very well and gets updated regularly. I have also found that just about every other Apple apple honers dare mode. The only one I have issue with is Preview and I now use an app called Negative from the App Store.