About Turn Off the Lights
Turn Off the Lights started as a video tool: it fades the whole page to black except the video player, so you can watch as if in a cinema. That is its distinct idea, and why it sits at the edge of this category. It also offers a night mode, an eye-protection overlay and a darker YouTube theme, so it can double as a way to cut glare. It is made by Stefan van Damme and is GPL-2.0 on GitHub.
You control how dark the dimming is, switch the lights back on with a click or Ctrl+Shift+L, and set a time window for night mode, with allow and block lists for sites. It is listed on Chrome, where the repository's manifest is Manifest V3, and on Firefox, Edge and Safari.
Its privacy policy says the extension has no ads or spyware and that your personal information is not sold, distributed or leased; an optional analytics dashboard stays on your device. It is not a Dark Reader replacement, since it does not recolour whole sites in the same way. The developer's own support site also runs promotional posts that criticise rivals such as Dark Reader, so weigh its comparisons accordingly. Choose it if dimming video pages is your main goal.
Pros and cons
- Free and GPL-2.0 licensed
- Dims everything except the video, with adjustable darkness
- Adds a night mode and eye-protection filter
- Listed for Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari
- Mainly a video dimmer, not a full-site restyler
- Many options that can feel cluttered
Permissions
It can read and change data on all websites, plus YouTube pages, because it draws its dark overlay on the page. It also uses tabs, storage and context-menu access.
