If you’re like me and millions of other users, you’re a fan of Dark Mode. Maybe you aren’t so much a fan but you spend a lot of time in front of a screen and you’re looking for a break from the countless websites that present glaring bright backgrounds and elements. Whatever your reason, bringing Dark Mode to the web has been an audacious goal for many app developers, web designers, and even Google as of late. The biggest obstacle with creating a unitasking dark mode tool is the fact that the web is a very big place. No two websites are the same and the code that runs underneath some of your favorite pages can be extensively different. From the way elements load to where images are served, websites run the gamut.
Don’t get me wrong. Many have tried and some have even succeeded, somewhat, at creating extensions to turn your web experience into a beautifully dark landscape. A quick search of the Chrome Web Store will serve up more “dark mode” results than you can shake a stick at. Some are designed for specific websites while others will attempt to apply dark mode to any website you visit. Some, like Grephy’s Dark Mode extension, do an okay job of inverting colors in a way that doesn’t look like garbage while others simply make a website look like a high contrast model that looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. It’s a crapshoot at best.
Google has been getting in on the action, too. The Android operating system features a very robust Dark Mode and eventually, Chrome OS will offer that same. In the mix, Google’s developers have been tinkering with a “web UI dark mode” but in its current state, it’s not great. Again, making everything Dark Mode is hard. Most of the extensions out there are free but we just stumbled across a slightly different take on Dark Mode and this “optional pay” platform offers up a really good Dark Mode experience while tacking on some powerful features to fully customize your web viewing experience.
Night Eye
Before we dive any deeper, Night Eye isn’t exclusive to Chrome. The Dark Mode extension is available for Safari, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Yandex, Brave, and more. You can even install it on your Android device via the Yandex mobile browser. So, what makes Night Eye different than other Dark Mode apps? Well, for starters, it actually works really, really well. Instead of simply inverting colors based on generic palettes, Night Eye analyzes each page you view and converts the colors in reference to all of the elements on the page. This results in a more uniform conversion. Instead of getting solid black blocks on top of opaque black elements, Night Eye converts the elements to the same or more complementary color codes. Now, a little caveat here. This process does take a little more CPU power than your average extension. For that reason, I did notice some slower than usual page load times on sites that contained a lot of images and moving pieces. Still, the overall effect is quite impressive.
The ability to present most websites in Dark Mode and do it well is reason enough for praise but Night Eye is much more than a simple dark theme extension. Once you add the extension to Chrome, you can actually add filters to websites instead of or in addition to turning on Dark Mode. These filters include a very useful blue light filter that many experts say is best for long-term screen time. You can also adjust things such as contrast, saturation, and brightness all from the extension’s dashboard. Night Eye also has “deep integration” with a handful of websites like YouTube and Twitter. These integrations allow you to make granular adjustments to the already in-place dark mode on the site.
So, what does an extension like this cost? Well, you can actually try it out absolutely free and use the extension on one browser while viewing up to five Dark Mode websites at a time. If you try it and like it, you can purchase an entire year of Night Eye Pro for only $9 and you’ll get three months for free. That’s dirt cheap, in my opinion. Night Eye Pro gets you the extension on three browsers and use on unlimited websites. For five dollars more, you can get the Power User options that gives you use of Night Eye on six browsers. Me? I think I’m going for the lifetime license. For $40, you get lifetime updates to Night Eye and unlimited use across then browsers. One-time fee, use it forever. While I’d love to see a common, all-in-one solution for bringing Dark Mode to the entire web, I just don’t see a simple answer headed our way anytime soon and Night Eye looks to be one of, if not the best solution out there to fill that void. Check out Night Eye at the link below and try it out for free.
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