night messenger

Ow, my eyes 👀

Messenger.com is a relatively little-known messaging interface for Facebook Messenger. It’s a great (and less power-hungry) alternative to the little chat window you get as part of the standard Facebook desktop experience.

I’d often work late in the night, and found that using Messenger.com would hurt my eyes. I had somewhat recently discovered the world of Chrome extension development, so I decided to dive in and see if I couldn’t make a darker theme for Messenger.com.

It went smoother than I expected. Google provided an easy way for an extension to add stylesheets and cloud-setting-sync abilities. The concept of a manifest.json was similar to a package.json file, and the UI for the “Developer Dashboard” was really intuitive - if a little basic. 😉

You can download Night Messenger here. At the time of this post, it currently has 30k+ users. Version v1.2.9 introduced properly-limited extension permissions and can be considered stable, although changes on Facebook’s end still could break the extension unexpectedly.

Let me know if you have feedback or feature requests. Cheers 🍺!

NightMessenger has been sunset in December of 2020, after breaking changes from Facebook rendered the extension prohibitively time-consuming to maintain. Thanks to everyone for the ride.