Dark Reader is a popular browser extension for Google Chrome which its developer, Alexander Shutov, released for Mozilla Firefox recently.

The basic idea of the extension is to turn any website design to a dark theme design for better readability especially at night when too bright sites become harder to look at.

Dark themes are quite popular and users who want to use them on sites have multiple options. Common options include installing extensions or userstyles for the purpose.

Dark Reader is an open source extension that is available for Chrome and now also for Firefox.

Dark Reader

Dark Reader changes the color scheme of any site you visit to a dark one by default. It adds an icon to Firefox's toolbar which you can activate to interact with the extension.

You can toggle the functionality on the activate site or disable the extension's functionality there.

The extension supports two main modes: the first changes the theme of any site automatically to a dark one while the second does not. It switches to a dark theme only for selected sites that you have whitelisted in the program options.

Dark Reader comes with the handy shortcut Alt-Shift-A to add sites to that list. This shortcut does not work properly in Firefox however as the Alt-key is mapped to the menu bar. So, instead of adding a site to the Dark Reader listing, you open the Firefox menu bar instead.

Considering that this is the first version for Firefox, it is probably only a matter of time before this gets fixed.

Dark Reader displays some customization options when you activate the menu. You can switch between dark and light mode, and can change brightness, contrast, grayscale and sepia values individually.

A switch to the font menu displays options to change the font type but not other font related values such as size.

The final tab, sites list, lists all sites that you added to the extension. There you may also switch from "apply the dark theme to all sites" to "apply it only to sites that I have added".

The dark layer that the extension applies to sites works fine on most sites you visit. If a site needs work in particular, you can either disable it so that it won't get the dark theme treatment, or report the issue to the developer in hope that he will address the issue in future versions.

Obviously, you could also install a userscript or userstyle for particular sites and use these in combination with Dark Reader.

Closing Words

Dark Reader is a powerful extension that brings a dark mode to any site you visit in Firefox and Chrome. It features the right level of control with its ignore or whitelist only approach to things.