How to turn on dark mode for any website in Chrome

Plenty of websites still have no dark mode. Here is what Chrome can do on its own, and where an extension helps.

1. Switch your system and Chrome to dark

Many sites ship their own dark theme and use it when your computer is set to dark. Turn on dark mode in macOS or Windows, and choose a dark theme in Chrome's appearance settings. Sites that support it switch automatically. Sites that don't stay light.

2. Chrome's Auto Dark Mode flag

Chrome has an experimental setting called Auto Dark Mode for Web Contents. Open chrome://flags, search for it, set it to Enabled, and relaunch Chrome. It darkens pages that don't have a dark theme. It's experimental, which means it can change or disappear between versions, and it can make images and colored sections look odd.

3. An extension that tries the site's own theme first

Lumen works in two steps, because a site's own dark theme almost always looks better than a computed one:

1. It asks the site for its dark theme. That includes themes switched by JavaScript and themes that only exist in the site's CSS and normally need your system to be dark.
2. If the site has none, it inverts the page, and puts photos, video and other media back to their real colors.

You pick Auto (follow your system), Dark or Off for each site, and Lumen remembers it.

Why plain inversion goes wrong

Flipping every color turns white into black, but it also turns faces into photo negatives and brand colors into their opposites. Lumen inverts the page, then applies the exact opposite change to images and video, so only the page chrome flips. Because inversion keeps the contrast ratios of the original design, text that was readable in light stays readable in dark.

Good to know

• Design tools like Figma and Canva are left alone, so colors stay accurate.
• Lumen needs access to every site you visit, because it has to read each page's colors and stylesheets to darken it. Nothing is sent anywhere.
• A few sites with unusual layouts can still look off. Set that site to Off and carry on.