
Dark Mode vs. Light Mode - colinprince
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/
======
Proziam
I have perfect eyesight and I have to say that I'm very happy dark mode has
become more popular. Light mode straight up hurts my eyes, even with the
screen brightness turned down, and even in an already fairly bright
environment. It seems totally obvious that there are people who benefit from
both options, so the fact it took as long as it did for this trend to become
more commonplace is really odd to me.

~~~
account42
I was fine with using light mode on a single 24" screen switched to dark mode
once I got a 38" ultrawide - there is just no way I am staring at a mostly
white screen of that size for all day.

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brundolf
I've always had good vision so maybe I'm biased, but I've never noticed a
difference in readability between the two. And if my display is >50%
brightness and I'm not under direct sunlight, and I'm using Light Mode, I
usually get a headache. In fact, in dark mode, because I'm not going to get a
headache, I can generally turn the brightness up _more_ , making for better
contrast and readability. It would be interesting to see a study where they
factored that in.

All of that said: we added dark mode to our app at work and my manager (who's
older) commented offhand that he could read things much better in light mode.
That was the first inkling I'd ever gotten that it was actually more effective
for anybody. I'd thought it was just an aesthetic preference.

Anyway, it's as easy as it's ever been to support both, which I did when I
recently rebuilt my personal website:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-color-scheme)

[https://www.brandonsmith.ninja/](https://www.brandonsmith.ninja/)

~~~
1MachineElf
Interesting feature in Reddit's mobile app is switching between light and dark
modes through the day/night. That approach could get your app the best of both
worlds.

~~~
noir_lord
Waze and most of the sat nav apps I use on my phone have that as well.

It definitely helps when trying to see a 6" screen on a motorbike at night in
rain not to blinded by what's effectively a torch in your sightline.

~~~
1MachineElf
Not only do Waze and other sat nav apps do that based on the time of day -
they often also do it based on whether or not your are driving through a dark
underground tunnel.

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AnIdiotOnTheNet
Hey guys, remember when you could just arbitrarily change the colors of UI
elements across your entire OS and pretty much all of its applications without
the requirement of bespoke 'dark mode's? Why has the GUI so dramatically
regressed from 1995?

~~~
simias
>Hey guys, remember when you could just arbitrarily change the colors of UI
elements across your entire OS and pretty much all of its applications without
the requirement of bespoke 'dark mode's?

I certainly don't. Do you have a specific OS in mind?

In my experience it worked as long as you only used applications that used the
stock UI toolkit without customization. As soon as some app tries to use
custom controls (or even just custom icons) it becomes messy, either because
these controls won't apply the custom system theme and they'll stand out like
a sore thumb or because they'll apply partially and make the control hard or
impossible to see correctly.

On Linux it's even worse because of the multiple UI toolkits/desktop
environment available (GTK-gnome/Qt-kde/motif/wxwidgets/...) which often need
to be configured independently from one another. And on top of that some
applications like gvim, emacs, firefox or terminal emulators will have their
own custom theme configuration that will override the global theme.

I definitely understand why Apple thought it was a good idea to lock things up
to give the user a consistent experience.

~~~
pc86
Did you ever use earlier versions of Windows, up to and (I think) including
XP?

~~~
Jaruzel
If you turn off Windows themes in later version, the gui defaults back to an
approximation of the Windows 2000 gui, and you can change all the colours
accordingly.

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ivanche
Finally an explanation for my case! I have both astigmatism and myopia. I
never understood why dark mode is so popular because to me it's unreadable.
Even worse, sites with black background and white text are downright hurtful -
after 20-30 seconds I start seeing just horizontal white stripes moving very
fast up and down on black background.

~~~
noir_lord
I'm astigmatic as well and I prefer dark mode over light, it's about the
contrast for me (or lack) though, I like somewhat bright text on dark
backgrounds.

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deweller
Somewhat off topic, but has someone created a dark mode stylesheet or viewer
for Hacker News?

~~~
poisonborz
Instead doing this on a site-by-site basis, consider using an extension like
DarkReader (for mobile, some chromium Android browsers and also Firefox
Preview allow extensions). It degrades performance a bit, a small fraction of
sites look broken by it (can selectively disable), but its a huge boon
overall.

~~~
rchaud
Dark Reader for Firefox seems to work only some of the time. I ended up
disabling it.

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amriksohata
Just use light mode and change your IDE background to a very light grey, win
win. Like the way HN has a beige background

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Kuinox
From personal experience, under correct lightning, there is no issue with
light mode.

But when the external lightning is bad (too high/low), dark mode is easier on
the eyes.

The only exception, is when i got 3 screen, and one is in light mod, and 2
other in dark mode. It just hurt.

~~~
vladvasiliu
This is also my biggest issue with dark mode: not everything is dark mode. I
find light mode to be more tiring than the dark mode when using a high
resolution screen, as text is often extremely skinny. However, as not
everything is in dark mode, for example web sites, I find it extremely
bothering to switch from one to the other.

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chooseaname
While light mode strains my eyes due to the brightness of it, I still prefer
it to dark mode because designers use blue for text and accents. I really wish
we could choose the text/accent color.

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arriu
A few things to call out:

1) Dark mode is increasingly not exclusively about the user experience. We're
seeing phones switch automatically to dark mode when batteries are low.

2) Dark mode, at least for email, has better readability by design. The dark
mode algorithm swaps foreground with background and then adjusts the colors to
be at least at a ratio of 4.5 to 1 (wcag 2 compliance). This means you can
have unreadable white text over white background in light mode and it will
actually be readable in dark mode. So having discussions about whether dark
mode is more readable is kind of pointless, it was designed to be more
accessible.

 _edit_ : If there is interest, I can share a desktop app that helps
illustrate dark-mode changes (specifically for email).
[https://imgur.com/NOGT5el](https://imgur.com/NOGT5el)

~~~
dasKrokodil
> We're seeing phones switch automatically to dark mode when batteries are
> low.

Do phone displays really save energy when displaying more black pixels? I
always thought that's not the case because the backlight is always on for the
entire display anyway.

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lucian1900
It has some effect for OLEDs, in which there is no backlight and dark pixels
are simply off.

~~~
kevingadd
Yeah, this is the quirk exploited by features on some phones like "always on
display" to be remotely viable battery-wise. They still eat into your battery
but because the screen is mostly black and the on-screen elements are dim +
infrequently updated, you can leave it enabled and be OK.

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hwdug8278
Dark mode is the ideal display for a computer screen since it's generating
light as opposed to dark ink on white paper which absorbs light.

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postalrat
Using dark mode tends to make light mode hurt my eyes. So I tend to avoid it
and stick with light mode.

~~~
marcus_holmes
I do the reverse for the same reason

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dzonga
personally, for me eye strain is less when I use light mode. Hence everything
has been default light mode, for the past couple of months

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Kaiyou
Isn't it possible to just merge both, so you get something like this site
right here?

