What is Night Reader?
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Extension summary
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!)
See moreUser reviews
- Works well with Duolingo and many other websites
- Provides a comfortable reading experience with effective dark mode
- Ability to customize dark mode settings for individual sites
- Functional on Google pages, including Google Images
- One of the few dark mode extensions that works perfectly
- Inconsistent performance; sometimes it doesn't work
- Requires access to browsing data with no clear privacy statement
- Does not work with PDF views
- Lack of an easily accessible toggle button for quick manipulation
- Effective dark mode for various websites
- Customization options for different sites
- Privacy concerns regarding browsing data
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Extension safety
Risk impact
Night Reader requires a few sensitive permissions. Exercise caution before installing.
Risk likelihood
Night Reader has earned a good reputation and can be trusted.
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