Cameleon support

Switching it on

Open the Cameleon app once after installing, so Safari knows the extension is there. Then open Safari ▸ Settings ▸ Extensions, tick Cameleon, and give it access to the sites you want recoloured. Nothing is recoloured until you do.

What Safari's warning means

When you switch Cameleon on, Safari says it can read and alter sensitive information on webpages, including passwords, phone numbers, and credit cards, and see your browsing history. Safari says that about every extension that can work on every site: it describes what an extension is allowed to do, not what it does.

What it reads

• The colour each thing on the page is drawn in: text, backgrounds, borders.
• The site's address, such as example.com, to look up the skin you chose for it.
• Whether the page is already dark, so a dark skin can leave a site's own dark mode alone.

What it changes

• Colours, through a stylesheet it adds to the page. Layout, text, fonts and links stay as they are.
• Under a dark skin, pictures and video are dimmed a little, to 85–90% brightness, so they sit quietly on the darker page. The light skins leave them alone.

What it never does

• Read what a page says or what you type. Text, form fields and passwords are never looked at.
• Send anything anywhere. The extension has no networking code and no permission to open a connection.
• Keep a history. The only addresses it stores are the sites you chose a skin for.

To let it work only on the sites you choose

1. Open Safari ▸ Settings ▸ Extensions, select Cameleon and click Edit Websites…
2. Set “When visiting other websites” to Ask, or to Deny.
3. On a site you want recoloured, click Cameleon in the toolbar and choose Always Allow on This Website.

A page did not change

Four causes, in the order worth checking.

• Site access. Click the Cameleon button in Safari's toolbar and choose Always Allow on This Website. Safari grants extensions access one site at a time, and a page it may not touch looks exactly like a broken extension.
• The site already has its own dark mode, and you chose a dark skin. Cameleon stands back there on purpose — you already have what you asked for, and two dark themes fighting each other reads worse than one. Choose the skin for that site specifically and it applies anyway, or pick a light skin, which always goes ahead.
• The site is built out of web components. A small number of sites put their whole page inside shadow DOM, which an extension cannot reach. Those are not recoloured at all.
• It is a photograph. Pictures keep their own colours; only colours the page declares are changed. Under a dark skin, pictures and video are dimmed a little so they sit quietly on the darker page.

A different skin on one site

Open the Cameleon button on that site and choose a skin. That choice is remembered for that site and overrides everything else, including the rule about already-dark sites. Hovering a skin previews it without choosing it.

Following your Mac's appearance

You can set one skin for when your Mac is in light appearance and another for when it is dark, so the browser changes with everything else. Either can be set to off. A per-site choice still wins over both.

Why the colours are not exactly the ones in the skin

Every text colour is lightened or darkened until it reads at least 4.5:1 against the furthest surface the skin can put behind it, which is the WCAG AA bar for body text. So a skin's accent on a raised card is not quite the accent on the page behind it. That is deliberate: the floor holds everywhere rather than on the page background only.

Requirements

macOS 13 or later, with Safari. Cameleon is a Safari extension and does not work in other browsers.

Refunds

It depends where you bought it. From the Mac App Store, Apple takes the payment and handles refunds: ask at reportaproblem.apple.com. From this website, we do: write to support@caddora.ie with the email address you bought with. Either way, tell us as well if something did not work — we would rather fix it.

The small print

• Privacy policy for Cameleon
• Apple's standard licence agreement for App Store apps.