Products · Product
Dark Reader
Raised as a usability problem by 20 people on Hacker News over 9 years (2018–2026), in 15 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Forced dark mode often breaks site appearanceUnreviewed
20182026- Forced dark mode on sites often looks broken, depending on how the site is coded2025-01-20
- Dark theme breaks on many sites, forcing constant per-site tweaking or disabling2022-03-10
- Dark mode extension makes pages load very slowly while it processes images2021-07-21
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 20 complaints
- Shows light interface for 5-10 seconds before switching to dark, every time2026-10-21
- Forced dark mode on sites often looks broken, depending on how the site is coded2025-01-20
- Dimming via Dark Reader is a workaround that feels clunky2025-01-19
- Dynamic mode shows a black blank page until the user scrolls2023-02-08
- Dark theme breaks on many sites, forcing constant per-site tweaking or disabling2022-03-10
- Triggers multiple page redraws on load, which is jarring and expensive on e-ink devices2021-12-02
- Dark mode extension makes pages load very slowly while it processes images2021-07-21
- Page, header and main content share one background, so the layout is hard to parse2021-07-20
- Page flashes bright white for a second before dark styling applies, blinding users at night2021-04-08
- Dynamic modes too slow for the commenter's mobile device2020-11-20
- Some sites perform extremely poorly with the extension enabled2020-11-20
- Extension significantly slows page loads by seconds, even after adjusting settings2020-05-17
- Dynamic mode makes pages slow to interact with on desktop2020-05-16
- Adds about five seconds of lag to loading and interacting with websites2020-05-15
- Dark Reader performs poorly on Gmail and similar complex sites in Firefox2019-10-30
- Firefox performance problem makes browsing almost unusable on many sites2019-08-01
- Extension makes Chrome sluggish and Firefox almost unusable on older machines2019-08-01
- Dark Reader extension is very slow to interact with on Firefox2019-05-30
- Older dark mode extensions broke websites, failing to switch some black text and inverting images2018-12-04
- Must disable theming on every site to darken only a few2018-12-04