Ask HN: Why has it taken so long for “dark mode” to become popular? - gjvc
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rumanator
My subjective and personal observation is that LCD panels represented black by
turning on the pixels to become opaque and stop the backlight from pass
through the panel. This strategy worked well to get to relatively black pixels
but a few years back typical consumer LCD panels were not very good at this
and allowed a significant amount of light to pass through. When applied to
large areas of the screen this, at least to me, made the screen look wrong and
not enjoyable, specially after being exposed long enough. Therefore, as the
user experience with non-dark modes was better, dark modes were simply not
used.

Nowadays consumer-grade LCD panels are able to represent better contrast, thus
the overall experience has improved.

My 0.02€.

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raidicy
I am not sure but I really hope the trend continues. Especially for
Excel/Word. My eyes are are pretty sensitive and while my OS and most of my
apps are using "dark mode" opening Excel or seeing a white web page actually
hurts.

~~~
gjvc
Make sure you investigate "flux" on windows, night light on mac, sct(1) on
linux, amongst others. I use a colour temperature of 3000K maximum during the
day and 2700K at night.

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burfog
It was standard for MS-DOS, the VT100, and many other things of that era. It
was common with X on UNIX-like systems in the early 1990s.

Once WYSIWYG document processing became popular, people wanted computers to
mimic normal paper documents.

