Re: System-wide dark mode

[mcatanzaro gnome org]

On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 4:15 AM, Allan Day <aday gnome org> wrote:
> How does this relate to the dark mode in WebKit?
>
> I was hoping that Web would follow the system-wide dark mode 
> preference, and expose it to websites...

The ideal, desired behavior is to enable dark mode on any websites that 
opt-in to dark mode, if and only if the user has selected the dark mode 
preference. We can't implement that without design changes in GTK since 
for that we need the ability to *very quickly* switch between different 
themes in the same process, and that's currently too slow.

The current behavior, in our current world where there is no dark mode 
preference, is that if you select a dark theme, a ton of websites 
break, because most websites are not prepared for dark mode and will 
draw e.g. dark text on dark backgrounds. So if we make dark mode an 
officially-supported option, the very least we need to do is force 
light mode on all websites, even if dark mode is enabled, to avoid this 
breakage. That's already sort of possible to do using heuristics, e.g. 
removing "dark" from the end of the theme name and hoping it makes a 
valid theme, but that's hardly a good solution. A more official control 
would be better. Notably, it *will not* be possible to do if dark mode 
is controlled by a gsetting, since we can't change the value of a 
gsetting for just a single process.

Michael