OLED Night

True-black dark mode for every website, without breaking it.
Free and open-source Chrome extension · Firefox desktop preview · readable text · images untouched · per-site control

Download latest ZIP · Chrome Web Store extension · Chrome Web Store theme · Website · Install guide · Report a site

Why

I've got an OLED monitor, and I wanted every site to be black. Not dark grey. Actually black, so the pixels are off.

Every dark mode extension I tried either left everything grey, or made sites dark and broke them: text I couldn't read, random white boxes, weird white gradients around chat boxes, charts turning into blank white shapes, Amazon photos turning into black squares. Some even made Gmail and ChatGPT lag. So I made my own. Every time a site broke, I fixed it and added a test so it stays fixed.

Features

• True #000 black backgrounds. Cards and panels keep a subtle lift so layouts stay readable.
• Images untouched. Photos, video and art keep their colors. Image dimming is optional.
• Readable text, with emphasis kept. Primary, secondary and muted text stay distinct, and Gmail's read and unread emails stay easy to tell apart.
• Respects dark sites. On a site that's already dark, it only deepens its greys to true black.
• Modern web apps. Charts, web components, embedded chat widgets and frames, and modern CSS colors (oklch, lab, color()).
• No white flash, and no lag. Pages go black before they draw, and updates are batched.
• Per-site modes: automatic, full recolor, deepen blacks only, invert (canvas apps), or off. Each site can also have its own brightness, contrast and image dimming.
• Schedule, keyboard shortcut (Alt+Shift+D), settings backup, and a "report a broken site" button.
• Private. No servers, no analytics, no tracking. See the privacy policy.

Install

Install the OLED Night extension from the Chrome Web Store. For a matching black browser window, install the OLED Night Chrome theme too. Store installs update automatically.

Manual install: Download oled-night.zip, unzip it into a folder you'll keep, open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode, and click Load unpacked on that folder. Full steps, including Edge and updating, are in INSTALL.md. To hear about new versions, click Watch → Custom → Releases at the top of this page.

Want Chrome itself black too? The extension darkens websites, but only a theme can change Chrome's own window. Grab oled-night-theme.zip and load it the same way. See theme/README.md.

Firefox desktop: A Firefox build is available from the source and CI artifacts. See Firefox installation. It currently installs temporarily for testing; Mozilla signing and a public Add-ons listing are still pending. The Chrome theme is not compatible with Firefox.

Using it

Click the toolbar icon on any site:

If a site still looks wrong, click Report a broken site in the popup and open an issue with the saved file and a screenshot.

How it works

OLED Night doesn't run one filter over the whole page. It works out a color for each element on its own: backgrounds, text, borders, SVG icons, chart fills, gradients, shadows and ::before/::after. It keeps each text's original emphasis and remembers what was originally behind it. Every update reads all the styles it needs first and writes the changes after, so a batch costs a single style recalculation. Brightness and contrast are CSS variables, so moving a slider never re-scans the page.

Development

No build step. Load the folder with Load unpacked, then:

for t in tests/*.test.js; do node "$t"; done   # unit tests
node tests/e2e/run.mjs                          # real extension in headless Chrome, 46 checks
node tools/package.mjs                          # dist/ zips for the extension and the theme
node tools/store-assets.mjs                     # screenshots for the README and website

See CONTRIBUTING.md and CHANGELOG.md.

License

GPL-3.0. You're free to use, study, change and share OLED Night. If you distribute a modified version, or charge for it, you must release its full source code under the same license and keep the original credit. Copyright © 2026 Brandon (bc1224). Versions up to 0.6.3 were released under MIT.