by Tex Leave a comment

Dark mode for Gmail

I sometimes work late at night, and I don’t want my screen flashing “white” every time I tab over to gmail while while my kids are sleeping. Gmail is one of the few interfaces that still has a white area.

And surprisingly, as far as I could tell, there isn’t a good Firefox dark mode extension just for Gmail. So I made gDark, a tiny extension for Firefox and Chrome. It darkens the white “reading” area and “compose” messages, and nothing else.

Why another Gmail dark mode extension?

I tried a couple and they all were doing too much. I just wanted to darken the white areas. I already like the “Dark” theme I have on gmail, and just wanted the white “Compose” and reading panes to be white too.

I also didn’t want to install a bunch of random ones that might be pulling my data or something. The top result on Firefox looks like its some kind of scam.

Most “dark mode for Gmail” extensions want to re-theme all of Gmail, or invert every website you visit. If you’re happy with Google’s own dark theme and just want the white areas gone, gDark is the small, boring fix.

The gDark toolbar popup: Always on, On a schedule (9 PM to 7 AM), Follow system dark mode, or Off

I also wanted to set up a scheduler, because I only need this at night, and I actually like the white area normally during the day.

How it works

It’s one stylesheet and a small script that only run on mail.google.com. It doesn’t run any background process and nothing on other sites. And the same folder ships to both browsers as a Manifest V3 extension.

What it darkens:

  • The email you’re reading — the white card in the reading pane
  • The inline reply / forward box, including the To / Cc / Bcc rows and the formatting toolbar
  • Gmail’s own controls inside that card: subject, sender, dates, Reply / Forward buttons, “Show trimmed content”

What it leaves alone:

  • Your Gmail theme, the inbox list, the sidebar — everything outside the card
  • Emails that were already designed dark — they’re detected and not re-inverted into blinding white
  • Photos and logos — images are counter-inverted so they look normal

Privacy

I made this for myself as simple and barebones as possible. So no, it doesn’t do any tracking or telemetry etc. The only thing stored is your chosen mode and schedule, in the browser’s own extension storage.

Get it

gDark is free on both stores:

Works with Gmail’s Dark theme (Settings → Theme → Dark). Firefox 127 or newer. Not affiliated with Google; Gmail is a trademark of Google LLC. Questions or a corner of Gmail it missed? Tell me on the support page.

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