Compare Chrome extensions: High Contrast vs Night Reader

Stats High Contrast High Contrast Night Reader Night Reader
User count 400,000+ 3,000+
Average rating 3.47 4.67
Rating count 5,896 42
Last updated 2016-11-08 2017-11-17
Size 158.72K 208.90K
Version 0.9.3 1.7.41
Short description
Change or invert the color scheme to make webpages easier to read. Reading comfortably with inverted brightness but preserved hue
Full summary

High Contrast lets you browse the web with your choice of several high-contrast color filters designed to make it easier to read text.

When you install this extension, all pages are "inverted", so black becomes white and white becomes black. Press the "browser action" icon in the toolbar to toggle it on and off, or customize your settings on a per-site basis. Use a convenient keyboard shortcut to quickly change your settings while you browse.

Other extensions try to change the default colors, but this ends up breaking many popular websites. Only this extension applies filters to your page that invert almost everything - the only exception is photos, which are left alone.

Also note that the Chrome web store and other built-in pages like the New Tab page and Settings pages are unaffected - extensions like this one are not allowed to modify them, by design.

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!)

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