This page has dark mode enabled

No, really

If you're viewing this in a web browser with dark mode enabled, or some kind of dark theme, you might be wondering what the hell I'm talking about -- it most likely just looks like white text on a black background. I'd hazard a guess that more than 99% of the internet would see it this way when they open this page in their browser. However, in Firefox on the computer I'm writing this on, it looks like black text on a light beige background.

What does beige have to do with dark mode? Well, it's beige because I've told Firefox that I want the default background color of all webpages to be beige! I could also set it to default to a black background, which combined with a white text setting, looks like this:

Not all web browsers are this nice to you

Your browser may not give you this option. In fact, I couldn't figure out how to get Chrome or Safari on Mac, or Safari on iPhone, to do this for me. I'm guessing there's a way to do this on at least Chrome, but a quick Google search yielded nothing useful. In fact, I'm not even sure I can get Chrome to change the default text color using its basic settings UI.

Why doesn't Google want me to change something so basic as background color and text color? Well, probably because it leads to strange looking webpages like this:

I don't think the creator of this page intended this -- but if you set the background color on some divs or headers and not others, you end up with something like this on my screen. Even worse, if you set a text color of black or very dark grey, but no background color, you can end up with invisible text if the browser's background is set to black! If you're making webpages, you can of course avoid all of this by always either setting both a background color and text color, or neither. A base CSS style like this will go a long way here.

body, div { background-color: white; text-color: black; }

But, this is a blog post made of text with a few images thrown in, and I really don't care what color you like your text to be or what background you want behind it. I could tell your browser what color to show in the case that you like dark mode, but I also don't care to do that. Maybe I will bother when I'm making other pages whose content depends more on colors. But while this one has a lot of content about colors, I'll leave it to you to choose what color you want your content to appear in.

You just might need a new web browser first.