Chrome is blessed with tones of extensions, something that cannot be said for its competition, not even its distant closest rival Firefox. However, since Mozilla rolled out the new design Firefox Quantum, the company has been working overtime to attract developers onto the Firefox extensions development team.
One of the first big deal in terms of extension that users love so much on Chrome – and was making it extra harder for them to switch to Firefox – was the Speed Dial 2. Now, they have roped in another developer Alexander Shutov who is behind the Dark Reader extension for Chrome.
The Dark Reader extension makes web page dark themed so that the ‘white’ on the pages does not hurt your eyes when you are viewing them at night. Well, I do admit, dark theme is becoming a thing nowadays. It seems like people just prefer to view darker pages on these screens on just about anything, whether it is Windows OS, mobile apps, or web pages. Dark theme has grown to be fashionable these days.
Dark Reader is open source and was previously only available for Chrome. Now Firefox users can install it too. The extension works by changing the color scheme of the site you are visiting, turning ‘white spaces’ dark by default.
Once you install the extension, you get an icon on your browser’s toolbar that allows you to interact with the extension. That way you can quickly activate or deactivate the dark theme on any site quickly. It also has a handy shortcut, Ctrl+Shift+A to add sites to the whitelist; the sites you want to be ‘dark themed’ automatically when you visit them.
Please take into consideration that this is the first time the extension has been ported to Firefox, and the developer might be experiencing some learning curve issue. So be a bit forgiving if it does not work as great, as it usually does on Chrome. Hell, my experience with Speed Dial 2 on Firefox was a disappointment from what I am used to on Chrome, but the developers do iron out the kinks with time.