I’m old.
I’m DOS’s forgotten user. The abyss of a black background becomes me. White is trendy shit, young folk stuff and something i’ve never for the life of me managed to come to terms with.
Preferences aside, getting old means your eyes aren’t what they used to be, though thank the Lord i still do me some oogleing; on topic however, it means that by now, i really, really cannot stand white backgrounds, headache in 20 minutes tops, then a killer migraine if i decide i’ll play it stubborn.
Enter our belated topic at last, as i have until now been using Waterfox classic with Classic Theme Restorer. The two combined, together with stock options, allow for a perfectly black background (everywhere) browser.
Except we’ve all moved on to Chromium. For our own good. Obviously. Sites only update for Chromium-based browsers or downright block others.
Already, i see compatibility issues with certain few sites and i’m sure the list will gradually grow longer.
Tried the nu-Waterfox, hate everything Google, so what a supripse, being very Googlesque, it doesn’t allow you to do the stuff you once could. I hate Google.
And definitely no black background, not a functional one. You try simply changing the colours in the stock options, buttons disappear, search images don’t show, etc. etc.
You can’t work with it.
Effing Google.
I’ve seen various .css tweaks, but all they offer is an autist’s heaven about clickity clicks and buttanz and space margins (ffs, really), leaving pretty much everything of import stock.
What does one do?
Rhetorical, but maybe someone has a magic answer; a different browser i’m not aware of that would work for me, a ready-made ‘theme’ i’ve missed, etc.
Otherwise, my thanks for reading, had to whine somewhere am afraid
I’m old too, now, but my quixotic struggle to banish white backgrounds started in the early 90’s, and I wasn’t so old then, in my early 30s. My eyes hurt, and are more prone to eye strain, with bright backgrounds. Also, the contrast between coloured text, such as one gets with syntax colouring, is high for many more colours against black than against white.
I’ve used many methods over the years. To often I end up with black text on a black background, hard to read. (Aside to app and web developers, if you take the foreground from a theme, take the background too.)
These days I use Firefox and the “Dark Background and Light Text” add-on. It has three methods it calls stylesheet processor, simple CSS, and invert, and one of them, or disabling it, usually works acceptably. If not, the Dark Reader extension can sometimes fix sites that the other is not good at. These extensions can force themselves on web pages in Firefox, and I’m not sure they’re allowed to do that in chromium. My chromium is an AppImage, and it won’t let me install any extensions or themes.
I use KDE and Qt apps are usually not too bad at following the system theme, or have a dark mode, or are able to set all or most of the colours. But for those that can’t, KDE lets me invert the whole window with a desktop effect.
I got a new version of chromium, a flatpak this time, and it allows the chrome web store.
“Dark Background and Light Text” isn’t there, but “Dark Reader” is, and it’s done a great job in chromium on a few sites I’ve tried so far, though I’ve had to use site-specific settings on one. That’s ok, because it remembers them.
