Dark Reader icon
Dark Reader icon

Dark Reader

 157 likes

This eye-care extension enables night mode creating dark themes for websites on the fly. Dark Reader inverts bright colors making them high contrast and easy to read at night.

Dark Reader screenshot 1

License model

  • FreeOpen Source

Application type

Country of Origin

  • RU flagRussia

Platforms

  • iPhone
  • iPad
  • Microsoft Edge
  • Google Chrome
  • Safari
  • Thunderbird
  • Mozilla Firefox
4.7 / 5 Avg rating (24)
157likes
15comments
0news articles

Features

Suggest and vote on features
  1.  Dark Mode
  2.  Browser extension
  3.  Zero Set-up time
  4.  Reduce Eyestrain
  5.  Safari extension

 Tags

Dark Reader News & Activities

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Recent News

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Recent activities

  • miinty liked Dark Reader
    about 2 months ago
  • braky updated Dark Reader
    about 2 months ago
  • mduderson reviewed Dark Reader  
    about 2 months ago

    Best open-source dark mode browser extension. :)

  • PredatorQ, namdx1987, gramblo353 and swagmaster87 liked Dark Reader
    2 months ago
  • makapav, Danilo_Venom and FreeAsInDom liked Dark Reader
    3 months ago
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Dark Reader information

  • Developed by

    RU flagAlexander Shutov
  • Licensing

    Open Source (MIT) and Free product.
  • Written in

  • Rating

    Average rating of 4.7 (24 ratings)
  • Alternatives

    21 alternatives listed
  • Supported Languages

    • English

AlternativeTo Category

Web Browsers

Apple AppStore

  •   Updated Nov 20, 2024
  •   4.22 avg rating
View in AppStore

GitHub repository

  •  20,787 Stars
  •  2,543 Forks
  •  1351 Open Issues
  •   Updated Jun 3, 2025 
View on GitHub

Our users have written 15 comments and reviews about Dark Reader, and it has gotten 157 likes

Dark Reader was added to AlternativeTo by David on Jul 10, 2016 and this page was last updated Apr 19, 2025.

Comments and Reviews

   
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Comment summary: Dark Reader is praised for its effective dark mode implementation, customizability, and open-source nature. However, users report CPU-intensive performance issues, which impact browser speed and can slow down sites like Google Sheets. Some find it necessary to restart the extension occasionally. While it's a favorite for many, especially for its Dynamic theme feature, it lacks features like those of Stylish, which allows more granular CSS customization.
Top Positive Comment
Hiki Hollow
Oct 27, 2019
7

While it has been one of my most used extensions, it does have it's own share of problems.


Dynamic Stylesheet Inversion

What it does, is generates a more suitable dark theme for the site. Sounds good? There's few catches.

  • It is CPU-intensive.
  • There is no sort of cache, which means EVERY time you navigate to a new url and back, it will regenerate the style. It would extremely help to have some sort of configurable cache, especially for highly frequented URLs (time-restricted entries. If they go beyond, they are deleted and regenerated).

Custom Browser Theme

Changes the UI tone and color to a different "dark", however impacts Firefox start-up noticeably.

Other Annoyances

The extension shows itself. So. Freaking. Slow. Most times, it is more viable to just try opening it again, until it decides to respond.

Mr. Anon
Apr 18, 2025
0

Best open-source dark mode browser extension. :)

Olav
Mar 15, 2023
0

Awesome, but.

Long standing, highly requested and even PR-ed features are not getting implemented, like better URL matching ( https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/pull/2517 ).

Simple stuff like sorting and filtering the site list is not possible ( https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/issues/682 ). Which makes site list impossible to maintain as the list grows.

Site list matching syntax is not documented anywhere.

seedlingjosh
Jun 28, 2022
1

Dark reader is the only Chrome plugin I tried that would properly show formula auto-coloring in Google Sheets. Night Eye turned every auto-colored cell address item the same shade of green.

D7
Mar 26, 2022
0

The best extension to put webs and some local files in dark theme. Easy to use and simple. The unique problem is the use of CPU.

LandisTwo
Feb 1, 2022
0

Dark Reader handles most sites well, 'out of the box'. There is very little need to make changes, but changes can be made if a site doesn't display with default settings. But, DR is Not an alternative to Stylish, as Stylish allows editing the CSS for every little thing on a site. Essentially replacing the author's CSS.

cutemariolcia
Aug 29, 2021
0

I sincerely recommend it!

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7 of 15 comments

What is Dark Reader?

This eye-care extension enables night mode creating dark themes for websites on the fly. Dark Reader inverts bright colors making them high contrast and easy to read at night.

You can adjust brightness, contrast, sepia filter, dark mode, font settings and ignore-list.

Dark Reader has also support for custom CSS skins, so it allows you to add different styles to the websites.

Dark Reader doesn't show ads and doesn't send user's data anywhere.

Dark Reader Videos

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