Firefox Nightly has native website darkening function

Mozilla is working on a feature to give websites a dark mode, even if they don’t offer it themselves. The feature can also be set to follow the operating system’s light or dark theme.

The feature is now in Firefox Nightly, says Mozilla accessibility employee Morgan Rae Reschenberg know on Twitter. The Nightly version of Firefox is at number 96.0a1. Mozilla warns on that page that Nightly functions do not always flow through to release versions, but with the announcement of Reschenberg that seems more unlikely.

In the Nightly version, users must activate the feature in the options menu. There you can set to adjust the colors anytime and anywhere, or to follow the ‘system colors’. If that option is checked, it therefore depends on the toggle at Windows level, for example, how websites look like.

The only drawback is that there is no way to adjust the setting in Firefox. If you want to change something in the color settings, you have to navigate back to the options menu. The same applies to Windows 10 and 11: they do not have a quick actions button for these modes; one has to dive into the Settings for that.

Until now, websites in Firefox had to be darkened using extensions. Two examples of this are Midnight Lizard and Dark Reader. The latter is also one of the handful of add-ons available for the Android release version of Firefox. An additional advantage of these add-ons is that they do have hotkeys with which they can be quickly turned on and off. However, they don’t seem to have support for tracking the system theme on desktops.

Google Chrome also has the option to make sites dark. However, as with Firefox, one has to turn to using extensions for that.