Night Reader

Night Reader

Reading comfortably with inverted brightness but preserved hue

What is Night Reader?
Night Reader is a Firefox add-on that eases your eyes by inverting the brightness of webpages. It applies the CSS filter invert to the document root, providing a general solution. Images are displayed normally, and hue rotation is applied to preserve visual appearance. Additional features include a domain-based blacklist, customizable CSS rules, and keyboard shortcuts.
Merlin
Stats
Users: 75 ▲ 1
Rating: 4.07 (27)
Version: 1.7.42resigned1 (Last updated: 2024-04-25)
Creation date: 2017-08-29
Weekly download count: 4
Firefox on Android: Yes
Risk impact: Moderate risk impact
Risk likelihood: Moderate risk likelihood
Manifest version: 2
Permissions:
  • activeTab
  • storage
  • http://*/*
  • https://*/*
  • ftp://*/*
  • file://*/*
Size: 109.93K
URLs: Website
Stats date:

Other platforms

Night Reader
Night Reader (v1.7.41)
4.67 (42) 3,000
Not available on Edge
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Merlin
Summary

This extension eases your eyes by inverting the brightness of every webpage you browse. The majority of websites mainly use very light colors, but some already have a refreshing dark theme. For these the user can disable the domain, essentially setting it on a blacklist of the application. Its goal is, in contrast to the approach of creating new webpage–specific templates, to be as general as possible. This is best achieved by applying the CSS filter invert to the document root, because it inverts the whole area in one swoop after it got rendered normally instead of going through every element. This is even more efficient because CSS filters rely on the browser implementation, meaning all the good stuff like hardware acceleration or other system specific optimizations. Images should still show normally, but single elements cannot be excluded from the filter. This is no problem, since they can just get inverted on their own before the whole document gets inverted, reverting the images to their original color. To preserve the visual appearance of websites which may be iconic like the blue theme of Facebook, another filter is applied that rotates the hue back by 180 degrees. However, due to certain limitations of the RGB color model, very saturated colors get clipped in their value component that would have to exceed the maximum, resulting in occasional weird–looking images after they got reverted. Where an exact representation is needed, the hue–rotation can be disabled.

[TODO]

more ideas to be implemented in future releases are: — serve options page to input custom CSS rules to optimize other websites — friendly ui for options page (e.g. click [+] to add a rule, specify the case e.g. as regex, input CSS to be applied into text field) — keyboard shortcuts for enabling/disabling on domain and more — (maybe) make only–invert option domain specific — (maybe) optionally stop inverting input text fields — (do YOU have an idea? contact me!)

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User reviews

Has this extension been abandoned?? Thought I had found a perfect global dark extension for Firefox only to notice the issue with Google Maps and some other sites. It's incredibly frustrating as it's otherwise excellent. Really hope the developer is able to fix a few little bugs :)
by Firefox user 6515740, 2019-11-07

In comparison to a bigger one that have the invert mode, it inverts less items.
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Safety
Risk impact

Night Reader may not be safe to use and it requires some risky permissions. Exercise caution when installing this add-on. Review carefully before installing.

Risk likelihood

Night Reader is probably trust-worthy. Prefer other publishers if available. Exercise caution when installing this add-on.

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Screenshots