Safari Just Made Browser-Controlled Dark Mode Real

Browsers are beginning to take responsibility for how websites look in dark mode, even when the websites themselves haven’t implemented it. On November 3, WebKit announced Adaptive Dark Mode in Safari 27.3 beta. When a user enables it, Safari can analyse a predominantly light website and transform it into a dark appearance. It adjusts backgrounds, text, gradients and certain graphics while trying to preserve usability and contrast. It’s kind of similar to Chrome’s auto dark mode origin trial, which I talked about a few years ago in this article. Anyway, the way Safari’s Adaptive Dark Mode implementation works is, first, Safari estimates whether a page is predominantly light or dark. It then transforms the colours of the element, attempting to preserve hue while inverting luminosity. It knows when to invert colors so elements remain visible or when to leave colors unchanged. When it comes to updating the text color, it targets a 4.5:1 text contrast ratio so that there will be…

Commenting on Bubbles has been removed. Why? If you want to talk about this post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. Suggestions? feedback@bubbles.town