In terms of the most balanced in speed, consistency in page rendering and good default settings, is there a clear winner?
Personally I've been using both Dark Reader and Midnight Lizard on different devices and I can't say I noticed much of a difference in terms of performance, what I did notice is that Dark Reader seems to have better defaults, but many complain that it slows down page loading a ton, I haven't heard the same about Midnight Lizard, but maybe that is by virtue that it has way way fewer installations and therefore fewer people talking about it.
Do you know if I've missed one and there is a totally different extension that does even better than both?
Really? Never heard about that, though I had my suspicion something fishy might have been going on with all those sponsors piling up on their website, I'd like to see a source for that though, after all the extension is still open source
I made my own with Stylus. At its simplest it's 2 lines of CSS which pales in comparison to what Dark Reader is going with, and then I have one section for exempted websites, and two sections for websites I use a lot that needed specific small fixes. It uses basically no resources, and doesn't slow anything down.
The one downside is that because it uses CSS filters, some colors become less brilliant. This is a known flaw with how CSS calculates colors for hue-rotate.
Install Stylus > Write New Style > Import and then copy/paste this in. Keep in mind that I removed a lot of my specific tweaks for sites I use, because that's PII. You will encounter many more weird issues on random sites than you do with DarkReader, but if you're used to working with userCSS you'll probably have no issues fixing those. The way this essentially works is by inverting your entire browser screen, then rotating the hue so the colours of website themes aren't weird, then it inverts images back to normal. I'm sure there is a way to do this without inverting the images in the first place, but it would involve one hell of a lot more code than this. I wrote this originally in about 3 minutes.
I use one called Dark Mode. Before that I used one called Dark Background and Light Text, but it kept flashing white on pages while they were loading so I quit using it (this was years ago and IDK if this has since been fixed).
Is it possible to go dark without extensions? I switched from Chrome to FF in Android because they got rid of that native feature... but I feel Dark Reader slows down my navigation.
If it is based in Chrome and used the flags to achieve it I think newer versions won't ship it... unless they have their own method... (I think Cromite or Vivaldi has it), does Samsung browser have a desktop client? That would be a must to me too.
On mobile I don't think there's any other way, on desktop you can use the crude background/foreground color changer in the settings. I think only Chromium implemented an embedded dark mode as of today
@kratoz29
Is your Android phone on dark mode ? If so, Firefox will be on dark mode too.
If it's for the PDF, can't say, I don't think even Foxit Reader can transform PDF documents i'to dark mode ones on the fly (haven't tried on fact). @QuazarOmega