Hypnotists have been shining bright lights into peoples face since the beginning of time, in the early 1800's the first methods of inducting a brain state into a person have been "discovered"/investigated. It should come as no surprise to anyone that what we look at also creates a mental environment. Before Television was invented/introduced the effect of fast flashing light on a persons brain state was well known. It is commonly known as the Alpha, Beta and Gamma waves. Without going into much detail rather depending on your personal know how you should be able to link the gazing at a monitor with a sleep like brain state. We experience it as a dream rather than a working environment. "Working" is perhaps a poor choice of words, I'm primarily referring to a passive non creative state of mind. Dreams may trigger the imagination and have a positive influence on the creative process if it becomes the end goal nothing will be accomplished. From the perspective of the status quo this is of course the ideal state of mind. You get to sit there, interact with nothing, influence nothing, and disrupt nothing.
Because I was getting increasingly annoyed with the bright white websites rendering my vast mind into a useless blob I decided to take measures into my own hands again....
Using Firefox I first installed
Greasemonkey, I looked over the
shitty scripts then decided to create my own in order to make all pages black with white text. This didn't seem to work the first 3 times so I then combined all 3 into
a rather crufty script that does what I want it to do.
Now I do have black pages but I still get bright flashes of white while loading them. So I open
about:config (by typing that in the browser address bar) then right click > new > "new integer" I then added:
I set this to "8000". What this does is repaint the page while it loads with an interval of 8 seconds unless the html is fully loaded, then it will paint the page anyway.
I've also added
google Enhanced BLACK v2.9.8 and
Dark skin for Wikipedia, not that that is really needed but the authors of those worked hard to fix small bugs in the page layout.
Finally I added the Firefox theme
In the dark to also make the browser black with white text.
I've been using the above setup for only a few hours now and it already reminds me of writing code in 1980 when this was the most common color scheme. Finally I figured out why I was so productive back then and so distracted today. Long nights I would spend in a dark room, the monitor was the only source of light. The bright white pages on the internet absolutely require other sources of light to be on or your eyes start to hurt.
I would almost dare say that any serious programmer already uses black backgrounds. There are of course people who can preserve their concentration better than others. This still doesn't mean they can not be distracted.
I suggest you give it a spin, do it for the sake of
proxomitronics. :)
I still have to reverse engineer Opera to do the same but IRC seems to be the main problem (for me at least)
Windos also deceptively allows you to change the desktop colors but you will find a black app background to be highly annoying as some programmers use system background colors then stick a black font on top. The end result is buttons without any text on them. I know how to work around that using keyboard shortcuts but I wouldn't call that a usability enhancement.
Have fun,
Another way to do this is by going to:
Tools > Options > content > colors, setting the background to black and the font color to white. This is a more powerful implementation and it seems more useful until you want to disable it for a single page.
More ideas to make pages black here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=2989135