I should have been suspicious. The Minions have been uncharacteristically quiet lately and behaving themselves; until they weren’t. Then, of course, they sprung another light-mode/dark-mode post on me.
It turns out there are a lot of sociopaths out there. Here’s a couple of examples:
- The new Safari (Version 15.0) comes configured to allow any random Web site to force a color change to what Safari calls the tab bar. That’s basically everything above the site’s canvas. The idea, I suppose, is to make the browser display consistent: if it’s a dark-mode site, then the whole browser display is in dark-mode. The problem is that WordPress sites all forced a dark-mode tab bar even for sites like Irreal that are definitely light-mode.
- Some especially evil person is offering an iOS Safari extension that forces a site’s display into dark-mode, regardless of the site’s preferred presentation.
Happily, right thinking people are not consigned to suffer these indignities. No one has to load and install Dark Reader and there is a way to keep sites from messing with your tab bar: In macOS, you can disable it by opening Safari preferences, choosing the Tabs tab, and unclicking the Show color in tab bar checkbox. It’s similar for iOS but the name of the option is slightly different as explained here.
Meanwhile, I’ve sent the Minions to bed without supper so maybe we won’t have any more of these posts. But don’t bet on it.