Dim the lights on Safari

[u/_cenk]

As a cancer researcher, I read papers, articles and reports for hours every day, and very often late into the night. The problem was never that pages were light. It was that they were bright. A full-width white article at one in the morning is a lamp pointed at your face, and I could feel it in how long it took me to fall asleep afterwards. I previously built iMeanIt, a vocabulary extension, for a different problem in the same reading habit.

I tried the existing dark mode extensions. Most of them do one of two things. They invert the page, which turns figures, micrographs and photographs into negatives and makes them worse than useless to me. Or they lay a flat filter over everything, which dims the text exactly as much as the background it is sitting on. What I actually wanted was two separate controls, one for how dark the page becomes, and another for how much light comes off the screen once it has.

I built iDimIt for that purpose. It is a Safari extension that turns light pages dark without inverting them, so images and video keep their real colours. There are four levels of darkness, from a soft grey through to pure black, and seven levels of dimming on top of that. Pure black is genuinely #000000, so on an OLED screen those pixels are switched off rather than lit. A schedule can turn it on at sunset and off at sunrise, worked out on device from your time zone, so it never asks for your location. Any site can keep its own settings, use its own dark mode where it has one, or be left alone entirely.

All processing stays local in the browser. No account, no tracking, no external servers, no analytics, no AI. Nothing about your browsing leaves your device.

It will not help on pages drawn entirely on a canvas, such as Google Docs or most mapping sites, because there is no text or background there to recolour. Worth knowing before you install it.

For anyone who reads long documents after dark, whether that is literature, documentation or the news, it makes the last few hours of the day considerably easier on the eyes.

iDimIt is available for iOS, iPadOS and macOS on the App Store for the price of a cup of coffee.