Light mode or dark mode? This is one of the most divisive decisions on the internet. Well why not have both? Personally, I think we should start to change the way we think about light and dark appearances in our UI. It shouldn’t be an afterthought, or a nice-to-have. I certainly don’t think it should be a paid extra feature. I think we should start to think of it as an accessibility feature.
Like so many accessibility features, it’s non-trivial to implement, but day by day more and more UI frameworks are baking light and dark mode directly into their systems.
So my mind was blown, the first time I tried out Arc browsers boost feature. With the power of the web, using simple CSS, Arc browser can turn any site into dark mode!
But alas, it’s buried in a series of menus and clicks. It’s not easily discoverable, and it doesn’t respond to the OS’s dark mode settings. So I made a prototype to address this.