Migraine mode

A migraine screen filter for your browser, with the FL-41 tint

When an attack starts and you still have to finish something, one shortcut dims every page, tints it rose, hides the pictures, and stops anything from moving. A timer turns it off.

Why monitor brightness is not enough

A monitor at its minimum brightness is still a lit panel pointed at your face. Night-shift settings warm the white point but leave contrast, saturation and motion alone. Dark mode exists on some sites and not others, and a bright white page in the middle of a dark session is worse than a consistently dim one.

Calmer Web works inside the page instead of on the backlight. It can darken below the monitor's minimum, pull saturation out of every color, and stop the animations and autoplay that photosensitive people react to.

What Migraine mode does

• Dims every page by a further 40 percent on top of full intensity. Adjustable up to 70.
• Replaces the normal palette with a therapeutic tint. FL-41 rose is the default. Amber, neutral grey, and dark rose or dark amber for inverted pages are the other options.
• Hides every image, video, canvas and iframe, and pauses any video or audio that was playing.
• Stops CSS animations and transitions, unsticks headers, removes floating widgets, and strips shadows.
• Greys out red badges and notification counters.
• Runs for 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, or until you turn it off. The toolbar icon shows an M while it is on.

It overrides your per-site settings everywhere at once, so you do not visit a site mid-attack and get its normal look. When the timer ends, your usual settings come back.

About the FL-41 tint

FL-41 is a rose-coloured lens tint that cuts light in the blue-green band around 480 to 500 nanometres. Migraine glasses from TheraSpecs, Axon Optics and Avulux use it or something close to it, and it is the tint most often studied for photophobia. Good and colleagues (1991) reported fewer migraine attacks in children who wore FL-41 glasses for four months, and Katz and Digre (2016) review the later work in Survey of Ophthalmology.

A browser tint is not a lens. It filters the page, not the room, and it cannot match the spectral curve of a coated lens. What it can do is take the white out of the thing you are looking at most, without you needing to find your glasses while your head is pounding.

How to turn it on

1. Press Alt+Shift+M on any page.
2. Or click the Calmer Web icon and press the Migraine button at the top of the popup.
3. Pick a duration. Pick a tint if rose is not right for you.

The free version includes one 10-minute Migraine session per day. Pro removes the limit and unlocks the timer choices. Settings stay in your browser either way.