Google Chrome's Secret Dark Mode for ALL Websites

[@SkyyySi]

The point of image inversion isn't to make them dark per-se. It's because a black UI icon on a black background is poorly visible. That's why it has a size limit, and also why there's a separate mode for images with transparency - a small and partially transparent image is most likely a UI element.

[@userwin64]

48 likes and no comments? let me change that

[@nusaindah3182]

52 likes and 1 reply? lemme change that!

[@TheSanpletext]

This is exactly what popped in my mind immediately he mentioned it. It might be because I have some background in frontend webdesign.

[@MrPrideHyde]

100 likes and 4 comments? Well, you know the drill.

[@laughingvampire7555]

I found this flag 3 years ago and tried to make it work for a year, it was never a complete solution, then changed to my previous solution, a combination of extensions, a generic dark mode extension that has the ability to be enabled or disabled by url and then an extension that injects CSS based on url matching as well. I'm a web developer so this is relatively easy to me. the only place where it is useful to have this feature enabled is to edit all the chrome protected sites from extensions.

[@MigProPlayer]

One reason that I prefer this setting compared to Dark Reader, is that because this setting is native in the browser, it can also invert extension pages and internal pages and menus of the browser. That helps a lot because I have some extensions that don't support dark mode.

[@laughingvampire7555]

but now chrome native pages are dark if your theme in the OS/browser is dark, I don't have activated the flag and the tab of experiments is in dark.

[@t3mpl3tw3]

Joe's doing god tier work again! Thank you

[@my2ndlogin]

I just use an extension called Dark Reader. Works pretty well and i can exclude websites as i'm on them, or turn the extension off. But neat to know it seems to be able to do it on it's own too.

[@prplt]

on its own not it's

[@wholeNwon]

I avoided that extension because of what I viewed as the potential for security risks.

[@DabiOW]

Using extensions is easier, but they cost some extra memory usage, can make the browser slightly slower, and are a potential security risk. Dark Reader specifically is probably fine, but using a native implantation has its benefits even if it's not as convenient.

[@WyattOShea]

Same love dark reader been using it for years.

[@Jaybearno]

This is one of those things that I have suffered with for ages and finally googled, what a great solution! no extensions, concise directions, and room for more customization. Thanks man!

[@BillAnt]

I've trried dark mode but it's too straining for my eyes, so I kept light mode. It's a subjective thing, some like it while others don't.

[@msh6610]

Been putting it on "enabled" for couple of years now, works great on most web-pages! Cant surf without it anymore really.. Amazing this still isn't an easy enable/disable option in every browser... Thanx for doing some research on it 👌

[@TheMAZZTer]

I've used this a lot. Here are my notes. 1. Not sure if this has been fixed, but in older versions, turning this on would force all sites to render in light mode, and then it would invert them. This means sites that support dark mode will not render normally. Though to be fair the differences are hardly noticeable most of the time. I don't know if it is intentional or not. It could be done to avoid accidentally inverting dark sites by just inverting the light version instead. 2. Very confusing if you're a web developer and don't realize it is active on your pages. I set the color to white why is it black?!? This doesn't make any se... WAITAMINUTE. 3. Last I checked KZbin's background for the player controls turns white which is annoying and makes the text on it difficult to read. 4. Some sites just don't work well (at least with the default of Enabled) which is unfortunate. It tries its best, but it wants to avoid inverting photos and only invert images that are used to style a website. This is very difficult to do and it's not surprising it has problems. As you noted one of the factors used is the size of the image. I used to use it for years but the problems eventually led me to turn it off, usually because it interfered with my web development efforts. This happened TWICE (see 2 above). Also the "Default" option for flags means "Controlled by Google". Google often does A/B testing by enabling features for a group of users to see how it affects their experience. If it has the desired effect they may move on to a larger group and eventually enable it for everyone. This is a great way to test features that may not be feasible to test on many different system configurations or with a large number of users pressuring an online system at once. Of course, they do the best testing they can in-house before then, I'm sure. This feature despite being in Chrome for years is probably not at that point though. I would expect upon enabling it a UI for temporarily disabling it or turning it on or of entirely and I don't think there is one. So it doesn't have that polish that would signal Google is ready to start wider deployment beyond flags. Also the shortcut you made won't do anything if Chrome is already running. You might want to actually add that --restart flag in to force it to restart and apply the flags. Likewise the normal Chrome shortcut won't turn off the flags if Chrome is already running. This is easiest to accidentally run into if you keep Chrome running in the system tray when all windows are closed (because you have an extension that supports that.)

[@MEKHISMOMT]

You don’t have to WRITE A FRICKING ESSAY

[@叵]

also the search results box on yt is still white and it hurts my eyes

[@MEKHISMOMT]

@@叵 is going back to the hospital now to go back

[@FengLengshun]

It's been there for ages, and the only real issue is that dark mode whitelisting is for some reason is still exclusive to phone. It performs better than Dark Reader too, so I would have switched to it had whitelisting is enabled on PCs.

[@jonnomonodesu]

Had it set to just enabled for over a year and was annoyed 'some' youtube thumbnails were inverted. Much better with simple HSL. Thanks.

[@c0dered111]

dark reader:

[@fluffyspark798]

I use it all the time. Great app!!

[@KryzysX]

👴

[@lolocomotive8553]

The chrome flag works better for me

[@KlaroNebulous]

fr

[@atpray]

It’s closed source app tho, and sometimes it causes some websites to malfunction.

[@Querxes]

Thanks for sharing! Hope you're doing well Joe!

[@migueldelgado6652]

Awesome video! Only I will clarify that based on my testing Default and Disabled are not exactly the same because Disabled is registered as a different action from Default, so it simplifies the process of changing the option if you prefer changing constantly instead of using a shortcut.

[@wixlogo]

Btw there's an reply cool open source extension called "Dark Reader" it lets you change to black and white theme in just one click, and even lets you change saturation and contrast and stuff like that.

[@volvo09]

Pretty cool. I love dark mode, especially on oled screens.

[@WyattOShea]

I love it tbh been using it for years :).

[@thegoldenarchitect]

Yeah that extension works great! The shortcut cut from this demo will be blocked by windows after the initial use and then you have to use dark reader to get the same results

[@oxidant5]

@@thegoldenarchitect What arre you talking about?

[@PhoenixAngel429]

Thank you for this. I have a large monitor and when I take a test for my school, it hurts my eyes bad when I have to expand the browser for the whole screen. This helps so much.

[@BulletNG]

OMG THANK YOU!!!! I have been struggling with extensions for months now. I've tried a couple dozen extensions all of which barely worked, and the ones that do work, you have to pay for. THIS IS PERFECT!!!

[@leifmessinger]

HSL is hue, saturation, and luminance, so it naturally has the calculations to keep the colors (hue) the same while changing the luminance.

[@BabyMayCry]

Thank God! Thanks Thio! You just saved my eyes from getting constantly blinded by the white background of the websites I frequently visit.

[@Stiky_Piston]

Opera actually has it in the settings menu in the navigation bar by default, which is nice

[@MegasXLR]

Been using OperaGX's Dark Mode option & love it :)

[@Pit_stains]

Good video. I found out about this feature a couple weeks ago. I had to select the "non-image elements" option, because other options would break some website. Some websites (like Amazon or Walmart) now look a little funky at times, but 99% of the website now look so much better in Dark Mode

[@Povilaz]

Very interesting! That's really useful to know!

[@Lucky-cs5ei]

Thankyou soo much for this, i have wasted 4 hours in disabling dark mode in chrome setting did not understand that it was enabled in experimental features, Thanks again.

[@RealDynamicDamien]

I may try this out, I already have an extension called Dark Reader that does all of that.

[@ProMace]

You just stopped me from purchasing Night Eye... Enabled the experimental Dark Mode and I'm loving it! Thanks a lot mate! 😎👍

[@officialtimothyphoenix]

Holy crap! Best thing of the day so far. Thanks for this video.

[@cybernit3]

Thanks I been scratching my head how to do this in google chrome, I even emailed google to ask how to do this, they didn't even give me this answer or way; they said in your OS set it which didn't work. Good job thanks again!!!

[@DjBasA38]

Opera GX has a nice switch for this to enable and disable it on the fly without restarting. you can also blacklist sites so it never applies the dark mode to sites that have a native dark mode, like KZbin.

[@NiiRubra]

This is pretty handy, I did not know about this experiment, thank you for the thorough guide on it!

[@wholeNwon]

I was unaware of this dark mode ability. It's very helpful for me. Thank you!

[@FairwellNoob]

Opera GX has this as a visible feature, called "Force dark mode".

[@TuxikCE]

The feature is really good, but sometimes it doesn't behave properly with most of the websites.

[@franklingoodwin]

It definitely doesn't on Android. That's why Samsung Internet is my default web browser

[@jaypeerogel]

Finally! Someone explaining the different dark modes. Thanks!

[@EarthrealmWarrior]

I've tried this but it doesn't work properly. Sometimes text is unreadable, there's no contrast between Text and Background. Is shouldn't be that hard since Firefox has a plugin called Dark Reader and it works pretty much perfectly

[@juljul123]

Bro pls make a on every flags of google chrome both Android and pc

[@ThioJoe]

That would be tough because there are so many, and they are often changing

[@juljul123]

@@ThioJoe yes u r right, i think an another video on top recent flags would be great

[@bumelo20]

That's pretty neat tbh

[@lukchem]

iOS has a similar thing built into the os called intelligent inversion or something with you can enable for the whole os or just for some programs.

[@VenocitySrilankan]

Your Videos Are Just Soo Amazing I am speechless 🗿

[@SuperVside]

Thio the hero strikes again. Thanks Joe! you da best!

[@BillAnt]

Another flag that caught my eyes is "Async DNS resolver" (disable) to prevent Google from resolving ad DNS'es. Pretty cool feature. :)

[@RivteX2]

high contrast also does this but makes it more "thin" where its harder to see certain icons like play buttons for MP3s and checkbox icons, to enable go to windows settings and search high contrast and mess around till you find something you like. (it's basically dark mode on crack)

[@ProjectKingpin]

Very informative video, thank you.

[@bmanrockwell2174]

Thank you, I was wondering why I couldn't have all my sites default to dark, now I know how.

[@lucifermorningstar2154]

broo love your video

[@SpaceWizardCosplay]

I've been using this on Chrome for a few years now, but thank you for the tutorial.

[@thebothyt]

OH! I Just Knew That Now! Thanks!❤🎉

[@marc_frank]

i've been using selective inversion of non image elements the simple hsl makes the google search page completely dark, while sionie leaves it a bit gray, which looks more pleasing to me i still have some issues on really old websites where the background might be an image or something and then both text and background are light, so you can't read anything if that happens i just select over the text or do ctrl+a so that the text gets a blue background

[@beautyneytiri]

it's so extremely strange there STILL is no full dark mode. yesterday things changed on chrome and again i had to install dark mode extentions, but now everything works very slowly. why on earth do they so badly want to damage people's eyes with the default white stuff ???

[@BillAnt]

Dark mode extensions have been around for a while now, while not perfect it was an option.

[@MrTurboRotary]

Super indepth & detailed car review. Thank you 👍👍👍

[@AstroRamiEmad]

I was going crazy googling what each of the options do! I tried to experiment with them. But I gave up as they didn't make any sense to me.

[@atpray]

Fun fact: In android kiwi browser has a very good inbuilt dark mode feature. Also supports extensions.

[@Rubicon1]

Thank you sir Subed, not based only on this video... but have seen your useful content a couple of times before.. All the best.

[@akhmadsaad2753]

Dark Reader extension works great, this is still great to know

[@VivekSingh-ih3zg]

Bro why shouldn't one use Dark Reader extension ? This method is really old one and complex.

[@ThioJoe]

An extension is probably easier with more features, but some people might want a native method

[@VivekSingh-ih3zg]

@@ThioJoe Okay. Brother can you make a video on automating Windows operations with Power Automate ?

[@zach123101]

I'll definitely be using this, but I would only want it off if it messed up some site, I wouldn't want to have a whole different browser for that, I'm sure you're a lot of other people will use your browser though. hopefully they add an easy way to turn it off once it's released. But as always thank you Mr. Joe, I may have some complaint but I wouldn't even know about it if it wasn't for you

[@LeeMyers-Jr]

I played around with this a few weeks ago. I turned it off because it was messing up different of my Google Docs and Sheets so that I couldn't see anything. I didn't care to spend more time on it.

[@mistygoodpuppy6167]

Thank you for posting....this helped a lot!!

[@zeenxdownz]

get the dark reader extension. you can configure it too if a website breaks.

[@abc_cba]

Been using the flags feature using dark mode since the past 3 years on Brave Browser. ❤

[@codemob]

Opera GX actually has a feature to turn on that flag by right clicking

[@fmphotooffice5513]

As long as it doesn't invert a white background over black text leaving the black text hidden or vice-versa.I have seen that in some Linux dark modes. There should be an automatic exception in the browser, etc.

[@elliotmarks06]

Looks really promising, but I'm going to hold off on using it until you can toggle it on a per-site basis.

[@anon_y_mousse]

I wish FireFox would integrate a dark mode into the browser so I wouldn't have to use a potentially untrustworthy plugin. As for your icon, I'd swear they used to use one that looked just like that, but the chromium-ungoogled icon is mostly black and I feel like that would be perfect for this.

[@strongjohn10956]

Great hint! Love it.

[@Midcon77]

THANK YOU! I much prefer getting rid of extensions and while the ones I currently use are pretty good, I'd rather just have it built into the browser. Thanks for shining the light (LOL) on this one! :)

[@NoobKillU]

Thanks for showcasing this feature, my eyes aren't really the best so this will be really helpful and less straining to my eyes!

[@Mboy556]

Thank you!! Simple one is the best for me

[@techleaner5566]

thanks you for this video1

[@LonestarROB]

Great video! Is the dark mode black black or a dark grey? I like dark modes but the dark black is too contrasty for my eyes. Is it possible to set it to a custom color?

[@laughingvampire7555]

I found this feature 3 years ago but is a mess. With every site there is always a little issue, because images are designed to fit into a light theme not a dark theme so Chrome changes the image using an invert filter for the color in the image so in most cases is not a problem but in some others it is, because a picture of people is inverted. there is one mode that does not invert images and then you have a horrendous light in the middle of the screen. So I went back to my previous solution, using a combination of extensions. I use a generic extension for dark mode everything and when this extension sucks I use the extension stylus that allows for custom CSS for any website they have a database of user maintained websites but sometimes I make the styles myself.

[@MrWillie123456]

I already use Auto Dark Mode app on my computer. It automatically changes my desktop from light to dark at a given time or when the sun comes up or down

[@TheGlitchyMario]

Unless there is an extension I don’t know about, it a loss for me, a firefox user

[@ThioJoe]

Bruh moment

[@TheGlitchyMario]

@@ThioJoe thank you…

[@Bajolzas]

dark reader

[@TheGlitchyMario]

@@Bajolzas thanks!

[@WyattOShea]

@@Bajolzas second this been using it for years with zero issues other than turning it off for websites that don't play nice with it or doing a quick off/on again to potentially fix a glitched website :).

[@weirddev]

Ahh, a 9 minute long dark mode enabling video

[@olafix_pro8010]

Nice. Now my eyes wont burn. Thanks Joe!

[@mr_redstone6699]

9:25 that AI did a really good job with the first one when he said "scared people" in the generation tab 😂

[@Charlie8913]

There's no quick way to disable it for the current site via a mouse click or keyboard shortcut, and it misses a blacklist for sites i don't want it to turn dark. So i'll stay with Dark Reader.

[@justice32legends]

Excellent tip and much needed one. Using extensions is just painful sadly.

[@birdpump]

My school actually blocked flags on the chromebook

[@mtdl3x]

What makes it useless for me at the moment is that it doesn't inverse the document area in Google Docs, where I spend most of the time working.

[@nathangregory_]

Very helpful. Thank you.

[@slaphead90]

I wish this would work the other way round for websites that are dark mode. Due to my eyesight issues I find dark mode eyeball tearing and almost impossible to read.

[@theloniuspunk383]

ah no more getting flashbanged everytime I load a webpage! OLED bros we're coming home!

[@_SJ]

Present 👋🏻 Thanks for this well researched video ThioJoe 🙂

[@RayUp]

Awesome!…can you do this on IPhone?

[@SwapnilNawale18]

I prefer Dark Reader Extension but it is third party extension

[@bigjoegamer]

Thank you for this information. I had no idea that it existed. I think the HSL mode is best for me, but I won't be using it often until you can toggle it on and off for any page that you choose. Firefox is my favorite browser, and I hope it will get a native (i.e. not an addon) version of that Chromium feature.

[@nosuprise]

thanks, it helped a lot

[@superNova5837]

I’ve had this enabled for a while on the enabled option something weird is yellow gets darkened a lot

[@NikCan66]

Excellent advice

[@gragor11]

Can we use this to dim those new blinding LED headlights?

[@agentallegator]

already available on opera gx

[@xXVibrantSnowXx]

I don't see why would anyone want to use bright white colors, Dark all day, all night long Ever since dark were more inmtroduced in major platforms, i've never switched back to white (whole white pages just hurts my eyes)

[@SUPER7X]

I wonder if this works better for Docs than Dark Reader. Gotta try it out. Edit: Wow that did not work at all for Docs. Turns the background blue and the page stays white. Dark Reader much better all around (for now).

[@jothamsia]

Been using it for a while, though I didn't know the one with the shortcut.

[@Rezail_Uhhh]

Dude after the first ten seconds of the video, I just hit enabled. My eyes thank you.

[@Stache987]

What about changing a dark background to light, and how will this print.. I've got a website I need to print out pages and it's all dark, I want to save ink

[@anon_y_mousse]

Print preview should show you how it will print. I would hope they'd account for that, but we are talking about Google.

[@ErwinMeulman]

Windows Store > Auto Dark Mode / Chromenium > Dark Reader (follow system theme) / KZbin video > CSS override filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg);

[@fxpartisan1823]

Sorry I don't know if it's a repetitive question, But are there any ways to include or exclude some specific websites when dark mode is enabled? Are there any ways to enable it just for a few websites and not all of them?

[@ramimagdi7525]

just use the dark reader extension

[@AttiqKhan]

Thanks for sharing this :)

[@drimisssss]

Great ! Thank you so much :)

[@edrod8807]

Thank you man!