Nocturne: Dark Mode for Web

Uses a site’s own dark theme when it has one, and recolours the page when it doesn’t. Images and brand colours stay intact.

Nocturne turns any website dark.

Most dark-mode extensions do one thing: invert the page. Nocturne tries three, in order, and picks whichever suits the site you are actually on.

SITE THEME Plenty of sites already ship a dark theme and simply never show it to you. Nocturne finds it — hidden behind a media query or a theme switch the site expects its own code to set — and turns it on. When a site has designed its own dark mode, nothing beats it.

RECOLOUR When there is no dark theme to find, Nocturne maps the page's own colours into the palette you chose. Hues are preserved, so a warning stays red and a link stays blue. Photos and video are left exactly as they are. Text is checked against the background behind it and nudged until it clears the WCAG AA contrast threshold, so nothing ends up grey on grey.

INVERT On enormous pages, where recolouring every element would cost more than it is worth, Nocturne switches to a single fast inversion of the whole document, with images inverted back.

ALSO • Four palettes: Midnight, Carbon, Dim, Ember • Brightness, contrast, warmth, greyscale and image dimming • Per-site rules — force a mode, or switch a site off entirely • A schedule: always, follow the system, or your own hours • No white flash: pages are painted dark before the site's styles arrive • English, Italian, Spanish, French and German

PRIVACY No servers. No accounts. No analytics. Nothing about the pages you visit leaves your device, and your settings are stored on the phone.

Nocturne is a Safari extension, so after installing you enable it in Settings, Apps, Safari, Extensions. The app walks you through it.