YouTube is a sleek, minimal white design with videos splashed across the page. What if you could change the white to black, making it more appealing but easier on your eyes when you’re in a dark room. Someone on Reddit discovered there is a dark mode that we’ve seen in Google Maps, Twitter, and other apps like Reddit.
The idea of dark mode is to make the screen less bright when you’re viewing the page at night, something you often do with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other apps. White backgrounds of webpages produce a lot of light even when the brightness of your screen is turned down. The results lead to strained eyes when you’re trying to go to sleep or “work” late at night.
Now we can all have YouTube’s hidden if you’re using Chrome and don’t mind a little work.
Turn on YouTube’s hidden dark mode
- Make sure you’re using the most recent version of Chrome (Chrome 57 or higher)
- Press Ctrl + Shift + I on Windows, or Option + Command + I on Mac to open up the developer console
- Press the console tab in the developer window
- Paste in the following plain text: document.cookie=”VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=fPQ4jCL6EiE” and hit enter
- Close the developer window and refresh the page. The dark mode setting is in the new and improved YouTube menu (top right corner)
The small change isn’t official and could cause some bugs on YouTube. Conceivably YouTube will keep the feature around since everyone on Twitter and Facebook is talking about this little hack. To us, it looks pretty slick, and will save our eyes at night!
Tell us in the comments below what you think of YouTube’s dark mode! Should YouTube keep the dark mode around or stay with the white? I know I’ll keep dark mode on just like I always keep dark mode on in the Twitter app.