What dark mode extensions can see
Last updated: 20 August 2026 · By the Eclipse team.
The short answer: everything on the pages it runs on. That is not a red flag by itself — restyling a page is impossible without reading it, so every dark mode extension including ours needs that access. What separates a trustworthy one from a dangerous one is what happens next: whether any of that content leaves your device, and how the extension is paid for. Four checks below, in order of how much they tell you.
Why the permission is unavoidable
To generate a dark theme, an extension must read the page’s stylesheets, inspect computed styles on elements, and watch the DOM for changes. Those operations require host access to the site. Chrome describes this to users as reading and changing your data on the sites you visit, which sounds alarming and is technically accurate.
There is no finer-grained permission available. “Change colours but do not read content” does not exist as a concept, because the colours are content. So the permission prompt cannot distinguish a careful extension from a malicious one, and you have to judge by other means.
Check 1: how is it funded?
The most informative question, and the one people skip. Building and maintaining an extension takes ongoing work. If a tool is free, has no paid tier, no donations, and no visible business model, the money is coming from somewhere — and in this category the usual answers are selling browsing data, injecting affiliate parameters into links, or eventually selling the extension to someone who will do one of those.
Extensions changing hands is a real pattern: a well-reviewed tool is acquired and a later update quietly adds tracking, inheriting all the trust the original earned. A boring, visible revenue model is a feature.
Acceptable answers: a paid tier, open source with volunteer or sponsored maintenance, donations, or a company using it as a loss-leader and saying so.
Check 2: does page content leave your device?
This is the question that actually matters, and it has a clean technical answer. Colour transformation is pure computation — you take colours in, you get colours out. There is no reason for a dark mode extension to send anything to a server in order to theme a page.
So: an extension that contacts a server on every page load is doing something that is not required by the feature. Some legitimate reasons exist — checking a licence, fetching a community fix list for awkward sites, update checks — but they should be occasional and disclosed, not per-page.
You can verify this yourself. Open DevTools, go to the Network tab, browse a few pages, and look for requests to the extension’s own domain. This takes two minutes and is worth more than any policy document.
Check 3: read the privacy disclosures
Chrome Web Store listings include a privacy section where developers must declare what data they collect and certify how it is used. Check that it exists, that it is specific, and that it matches the behaviour you observed in check 2. A listing claiming no data collection while the extension phones home on every page is a contradiction worth acting on.
Be suspicious of policies that are generic boilerplate, that reserve broad rights to share data with unnamed partners, or that are hosted somewhere unrelated to the extension.
Check 4: the ordinary listing signals
- Recent updates. An abandoned extension with broad permissions is a liability.
- Reviews mentioning behaviour changes after an update — the acquisition pattern shows up here first.
- A real website and a working support contact.
- Permissions beyond what the feature needs. A dark mode tool has no business requesting access to your browsing history, downloads, or clipboard.
What Eclipse does
Stated plainly so it can be checked against the behaviour:
- Colour transformation happens entirely on your device. Page content is never transmitted anywhere — there is no server-side rendering step, because there is no reason for one.
- The backend exists only for accounts and licensing. It is contacted for sign-in and for a periodic licence check, not per page and not per site.
- Settings and per-site preferences are stored in your browser.
- The funding model is a paid Pro tier. That is how the work is paid for, and it is why we do not need another revenue source.
Our privacy policy is written from the actual schema and routes rather than from a template, and deliberately does not claim protections we have not built.
Try it yourself: Eclipse applies a generated dark theme to any site, with per-site overrides and live brightness and contrast controls. Free, no account, no site limits.
If you want maximum caution
- Set the extension to run on click rather than on every site. In Chrome: right-click the icon → This can read and change site data → When you click the extension. You lose automatic theming; you gain explicit control.
- Exclude sensitive sites — banking, health, work systems — using per-site settings.
- Prefer a site’s own dark mode where one exists. No extension involvement at all.
- Consider Chrome’s built-in flag, which needs no extension and therefore no permissions — with the trade-offs described here.
- Audit periodically. Extensions update; trust is not permanent.
Product and website names mentioned here belong to their respective owners and are used only to describe what they do. Eclipse is an independent extension and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them.
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