Dark Mode

i love the idea

Hi everyone!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on a dark mode for Khan Academy to help you study at night. We are always working to add features that improve our site, and we love getting input from our community.

I've passed your feedback along to the team and it will be part of our conversation as we plan the future of Khan Academy.

In the meantime, you can search for browser extensions that can help you view not only Khan Academy in dark mode but other websites as well. There is an extension called "Dark Reader" that can be installed on browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox and it works really well.

Thanks for helping improve Khan Academy!

Why isn't it integrated in as a setting already

According to our Tech Director, who looked into Dark Mode, there is a charge of $10 per student to enable Dark Mode. We cannot afford to do that.

Paying for dark mode is actually kind of ridiculous when you could simply code it in for free.... Sorry if that sounds rude that's not my intention but I'm pretty sure you guys already good enough from the either yearly or monthly donates that almost everyone does if they have the money for it.

@lmcreynolds
What entity would charge $10/student to enable Dark Mode?  

@JaniceHolz I've heard the same thing but I found out on Reddit, I dont understand why either. Maybe it's to help fund more money for something else in the future that could either benefit us or just them.

That's kinda what I just said, them meaning as is the company.

oh, just making sure i understood!

Sorry 😅

You are okay! It's fine, Just in the future, you should do that. (using what you said earlier, "Maybe it's to help fund more money for something else in the future that could either benefit us or just them.") (it could be like this instead: "Maybe it's to help fund more money for something else in the future that could either benefit us or just them. (them being the company)" Just a suggestion! :)

Hi everyone,

Thank you for continuing the conversation and sharing your thoughts about dark mode!

I wanted to clarify that the Dark Reader browser extension we recommend is actually free to use. While the developers suggest a $9.99 donation, it’s completely optional—not required. The extension is also open-source, so schools and organizations can modify it if needed. Additionally, it does not collect any user data. I’ve tested this extension myself and found that it works reasonably well on Khan Academy, especially when using the "Dynamic" theme generation mode.

As for adding an official dark mode directly to Khan Academy, we definitely understand how helpful it would be, especially for those studying at night. It’s something our team has explored. However, implementing a dark mode across a platform as large and complex as Khan Academy would require significant engineering and design resources. We’d need to:

• Build a new design system that supports dark and light themes.
• Update styles across hundreds of pages and components.
• Recreate many static images and graphics to display properly in dark mode.
• Test everything for accessibility compliance to ensure the experience works for all learners.

Because we focus most of our engineering and design resources on developing core learning features and keeping Khan Academy free for everyone, we haven’t been able to prioritize this yet, and it’s unlikely that a native dark mode will be available in the foreseeable future.

That said, we truly value your feedback and have shared it with our team so they can consider it as we plan future improvements. We have an existing tracker for Dark Mode requests and will continue to add new user feedback/posts to it in the future.

Thanks again for your input and for helping make Khan Academy better!

Does doing the thing's you mentions cost money? It obviously costs time, and how much? And, why do you (for lack of a better term) restrict dark mode to just the mobile app?

Hi neptunesalad120,

Thanks for your thoughtful follow-up questions!

You're absolutely right that even something that seems “simple” like dark mode has real costs—both in terms of time and money. Since our team is small and we do pay our developers and designers, any large project we take on needs to be carefully prioritized. A full-featured dark mode would likely take at least a month or more of work. (There's a really interesting and helpful discussion on this here)

Like many tech organizations, we try to focus on the features that provide the most value to the most users with the least complexity and cost, so we can keep Khan Academy free and high-quality for millions of learners around the world.

The mobile app does include an experimental dark mode, but it's built on a completely separate codebase from the website. That means the design systems, technology, and effort needed to build dark mode on web vs. mobile are very different. What works on one platform doesn't automatically transfer to the other.

As for your question about browser extensions: We understand that not every student can install them directly. Some school-managed devices have restrictions in place, but many schools using Google accounts or Chromebooks can approve individual extensions—or even push them to all student accounts at the school, grade, or district level. Since Dark Reader is open source, free to use, and doesn’t collect user data, most tech directors should be willing to approve it if requested. I suggest reaching out to your school's media/tech center if you're in that situation.

We're continuing to explore ways to improve accessibility and user comfort across our platform, and we always appreciate hearing your feedback—it helps us make better decisions as we plan for the future.

Thanks again!

What are those time and money costs if you don't mind me asking?

but on every low paid source,  there is probably dark mode

and it hurts my eyes and I am not allowed to get extensions.

Helloimridit

Who is not allowing you to get extensions? Is there a way for you to petition to get the free  Dark Reader browser extension ?

"Like many tech organizations, we try to focus on the features that provide the most value to the most users with the least complexity and cost, so we can keep Khan Academy free and high-quality for millions of learners around the world."

and dark mode isnt valuble to your users?

neptunesalad120 I agree 100%. Dark mode would help me stay on the platform and study for much longer, but alas, Khan Academy refuses to implement it, so I am stuck with no dark mode, and all of the extensions have many bugs, which make it pretty much unusable.

I'm actually looking into making my own dark mode extension tailored specifically for Khan Academy...

We'll see how that goes.

neptunesalad120 Thank you! I'll post the link to the GitHub here once it's done.

Swarit Narang

Does the  Dark Reader browser extension also have too many bugs to use?  If so, maybe if you shared the specific problems with KA staff they would take the need for a native dark mode more seriously.

Because teachers say it might hack our chromebooks, (and I bring my chromebook home sometimes)

@Helloimridit

Is there a way for you or your parents/guardians to petition the school's tech team to allow the Dark Reader Browser extension?  I wouldn't expect every classroom teacher to be aware of which extensions are safe, but the school district's tech team should be more informed.

For mobile Chromium-based browsers, you may turn on force dark mode with selective inversion of non-image elements with chrome://flags, although the mobile app has a dark theme.

I use Dark Reader and unfortunately, some images are transparent and require turning off Dark Reader to see them. I think the Pitch Black OLED Theme is probably the most important thing to add to the Khan Academy site, except additional gamification like leaderboards or something like that to spice up to the experience.