Dark Theme not working in Browser within Cursor (Chrome)

[Alan_Kong]

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Dark Theme in the Cursor IDE Browser (Chrome) doesnt seem to be working correctly.
It has default to Light Theme, even though all my settings are in Dark Theme

Steps to Reproduce

Open a link within cursor from the terminal

Expected Behavior

It should be Dark Theme

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 2.4.21 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: dc8361355d709f306d5159635a677a571b277bc0
Date: 2026-01-22T16:57:59.675Z
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.2.7
Chromium: 142.0.7444.235
Node.js: 22.21.1
V8: 14.2.231.21-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.2.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

[deanrie]

Hey, thanks for the report.

This is a known issue with how the browser passes theme preference to websites. Can you try a couple things to help diagnose it?

1. Open DevTools in your browser → Console → run:

   window.matchMedia('(prefers-color-scheme: dark)').matches
   

   It should return true if the browser is correctly passing the dark preference.

2. Try opening another site with clear dark mode support (for example, github.com). Is it also showing the light theme there?

It’s possible your site just doesn’t support prefers-color-scheme: dark.

The team is aware of this browser theme bug. Sometimes the theme preference is passed incorrectly, or it doesn’t work at all.

Related threads:

• Dark Reader plugin bleeding into my Cursor browser
• Cursor is forcing dark them on the cursor bowers

[Alan_Kong]

Visited google website - initially it was defaulted to light theme, once i switch is on the browser, it becomes dark theme going forward.

This is the localhost url that i am accessing.
By right I would expected it to follow my chrome browser setting which is dark theme but i cant seems to toggle it back to dark mode theme for some reason.
it seems that the browser is already in dark theme but the background is white with white text so something is wrong over here.

Left is cursor, right is chrome browser

Github is showing up correctly in dark theme

I also took a look at this setting in cursor to detect color scheme in my system which is dark mode on the mac - window: Auto Detect Color Scheme.

[Alan_Kong]

A quick observation is that i open the devtools and switch between light and dark theme it did not change anything.

However, If i change the it inside the CSS inspector, I am able to toggle light and dark but somehow the dark theme background remains white while the text color changes to white from black.