Hacker Vision for Chrome turns too bright sites into eye-pleasing ones

Martin Brinkmann
Oct 22, 2013
Google Chrome, Google Chrome extensions
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Starring at a computer screen for hours each day can be quite strenuous regardless of activity.  If you do this day in and out, you have probably experienced your fair share of too bright websites or programs, especially at night or in darker environments.

While it helps to reduce the screen brightness, it does not take care of the underlying issue itself. And if you have a monitor that starts to make irritating noises when you change the brightness, you may not even be able to make that change at all.

Browser extensions or scripts can provide you with the means to change the glaring white of many web pages on the Internet to eye-pleasing levels.

Hacker Vision is browser extension for the Google Chrome browser that inverts the color scheme of all websites that you view in the browser automatically once you have installed it on your system.

Hacker Vision

Below is an example of how the popular website Reddit looks like once you have installed the extension.

reddit hacker vision

Note: Most websites use a bright color scheme which means that they will be turned into a darker version once you have installed the extension. If you visit dark websites on the other hand, they will be turned into brighter ones automatically by the extension.

The extension adds an icon to the address bar of the Chrome web browser. You can click on it for options to change the color scheme of the website that is currently displayed in the program.

The default choice is Hacker Vision, which you can switch to Normal instead. This is great for dark websites that have been turned into brighter ones by the extension, and also for websites where the darker color schemes does not work at all, or distorts the view.

There is also an option to pause the use of the extension for the time being.

Most websites look just fine when you run the extension. Some on the other hand may not show any difference at all, even if they use a white background. Here on Ghacks for instance, you will notice that the white background remains even after you have installed the extension. It is not really clear why that is happening at this point in time.

An alternative to Hacker Vision is Deluminate which works in pretty much the same way. It does however provide you with additional options on how to deal with images on the website (smart invert, invert, or keep images).

Firefox users can use Dimmer, an extension for the browser, to dim the browser screen and Android users the Auto Brightness app.

Verdict

The browser add-ons and scripts may not work in all situations, and if you run into regular issues using them, you may want to consider using a software program instead to change the brightness level of the whole screen regardless of application used.

Now Read:  Change your display brightness on Windows with Dimmer

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Comments

  1. diegocr said on October 23, 2013 at 10:47 pm
    Reply

    For Firefox I use Color Transform[1] and apparently it’s much more advanced than that Chrome extension, or the pointed Fx one.

    [1] : https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/color-transform/

  2. Anon said on October 23, 2013 at 2:15 am
    Reply

    I’ve been using this everyday for almost a year now and it’s awesome!

    I’m viewing this page in it right now and everything appears dark to me, not sure what you’re talking about in your article about the white background-

  3. Leaving The G said on October 22, 2013 at 6:13 pm
    Reply

    I actually just use custom css for most sites, and make everything dark. I also use f.lux , which reduces eye strain for me.

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