This Is the New Dark Mode in Mozilla Firefox 70

Mozilla Firefox 70 is now available for download on all supported platforms, and one of the highlights in this release is the further polished dark mode that users on the desktop can enable in their browsers.

Very important to note is that the dark theme doesn’t come with a manual switch in the settings screen but automatically follows the system configuration.

In other words, on Windows 10, for instance, if you enable the dark mode in the OS, the same theme should be activated in Firefox as well all automatically. Switching back to the light mode in Windows also returns Firefox to the classic mode.

This approach has previously been used by other apps as well, including here Firefox’s big rival Google Chrome.

Users out there, however, haven’t necessarily received this idea very well, as some wanted to enable the dark mode in Windows 10 without the browser enabling the dark theme as well, and the other way around. It remains to be seen if things will be different in Mozilla’s case, but an option to make the dark mode independent from Windows 10 settings would have been great.

In Firefox 70, the dark theme is substantially more refined than in the previous releases, so you should notice it in more pages across the browser, which can only be good news given it all contributes to increased consistency when using the app.

The dark mode is now in the majority of Firefox menus and pages, like the about:config screen, settings, downloads, and others. By the looks of things, Mozilla has spent a considerable amount of time to refine this visual style, and everything looks really polished from one end to another.

Developer tools don’t come with a full dark mode just yet, but I expect Mozilla to add further improvements in this regard in the coming updates.

Firefox still comes with rather basic appearance configuration settings under:

For the time being, extension menus are also using the standard theme, but it’s probably just a matter of time until add-on developers roll out updates to align with the visual improvements in Firefox. Truth be told, light menus for some extensions are actually very annoying, especially when clicking them in the middle of a night and you end up with a grey menu while everything else on the screen is dark.

Needless to say, the dark mode will further be refined in the coming releases, and I expect Firefox to complete its dark theme rollout, with all pages and components using this visual style, in the next couple of updates.

Firefox is currently the second most-used desktop browser out there, so improvements like this are clearly welcome, especially given the number of users. In fact, dark modes have become a priority for the majority of software developers nowadays, and Mozilla clearly does the right thing by further polishing its version with every release.

We’ll be keeping an eye on how the dark theme further evolves in Firefox in the coming updates, and check out the screenshot gallery below to see the current implementation in action. Keep in mind that you must be running an operating system with a built-in dark mode to benefit from this updated experience, as it’s the case of the latest versions of Windows 10.