Open Google Scholar and the screen glows white. I only wanted to read papers, but staring at it for long stretches wore my eyes out. This Chrome extension exists to remove that one problem. Install it, and only Google Scholar’s colors turn dark. There are no settings.
It started with tired eyes in the lab
At the time, I spent my days searching for papers in a university lab. Google Scholar was a tool I used constantly, but it only came in light mode. Looking at a bright white screen for hours gradually tires your eyes. Wanting to fix that was the starting point.
I had been building Chrome extensions for a while before this, so I could tell myself “something like this, I can build quickly.” When I ran into a problem, the option to fix it myself was already within reach.
I built no settings screen and no on/off button
This extension has no settings screen. It has no on/off toggle either. From the moment you install it, Google Scholar simply turns dark.
I wanted it as simple as possible, so I cut those things out. It was also a decision made with maintenance in mind. Adding features means more code, and more places that can break. What I want is to read papers, not to fiddle with an extension’s settings.
As for on/off, I decided there was no need to build my own. When you do not want it, you can just toggle the extension on or off from the browser. I trusted the mechanism the browser already provides and chose not to rebuild the same thing. The reason for the simplicity is not laziness but removing duplication.
In an age without AI, I applied CSS one piece at a time
The whole thing is made of CSS. You could invert the entire screen with a filter, but then paper thumbnails and icons get inverted too, which makes things harder to read. So I applied a dark color scheme by hand, part by part: the toolbar, the search box, and so on.
Generative AI did not exist yet. I opened the HTML in Chrome’s developer tools, checked each element’s class name one by one, and wrote the matching CSS. Google’s HTML uses short class names whose meaning is hard to read, so pinning down each element was tedious work. Today it might be something you could hand off to AI, but back then there was nothing to do but knock them out one at a time by hand.
I made it OSS because “it’s just changing CSS”
People in the same lab were using what I had built. It was made for myself, but all it does is change some CSS. So I released it as OSS without any hesitation and published it to the Chrome Web Store. My feeling was simply: if someone wants to use it, I hope they do.
That extension went on to be used by 4,000 people within two years of release.
Simple, yet no one had made it
Looking back, what strikes me is that it is extremely simple, and precisely because no one had made it, this many people ended up using it. It is not that people want complex things. You solve a small problem right in front of you by the shortest path, and that same solution reaches someone else struggling with the same thing. This extension taught me that.
