From early green or amber text on black mono displays.
Grey on black DOS text mode.
Light Blue on Dark Blue C-64.
Apple 2's grey/white (I don't recall) on black.
Even GUI wise, Amiga used a dark-blue background as the default Workbench, with user selectable palettes for everything.
It was Microsoft Windows that changed the paradigm to default to a searing white display with black text in most apps, like Notepad, Word, etc., because "it's more like paper". Sure, paper is white, but it's not glowing white. That transition was painful.
I'm glad to see dark-modes return, I agree there needs to be an option, not just forced dark-mode. Preferably light mode options to use a not-as-bright-as-possible white too.
And you shouldn't have your device or monitor set to glowing white -- turn the brightness down so it's the same as a sheet of paper next to it.
And Windows didn't change the paradigm, the Mac was the first widely available consumer device which did. And its built-in CRT wasn't especially glowing either -- it was less bright than paper in traditional office lighting.
Early computers had "dark" color schemes because the resolution was so low and pixels "bled" brightness, that it was easier to read. As technology improved, that problem thankfully went away, and it's easier on the eyes to read dark text on a light background, regardless of print or screen.
There’s a significant base of users that prefer light mode and dark mode so provide both, it’s generally not difficult to do so.
I disagree that apps should tone down light mode. It’s better that all apps use the same brightness and contrast and then users can adjust their monitor to suit their individual preference.
> There’s a significant base of users that prefer light mode and dark mode so provide both, it’s generally not difficult to do so.
There’s a significant base of users that hate with a passion all low contrast dark gray on light gray (aka llight mode) or light gray on dark gray (aka dark mode).
When has the brain of people promoting this been damaged ?
Paper, particularly bleached paper, is not "traditional normal" either.
I'm no paleontologist, but originally humans would use substances like ash and fruit to draw/write on rock/leaves/bark, so white/red/colors on grey/green/brown.
Disagree, white should be standardised as #FFFFFF so that it’s consistent between applications. Then users can adjust how they want “white” to appear by adjusting their screen settings.
No, #FFF is white, and it's up to the client to decide what white should look like.
Arguing that we should use, say, #CCC for white, is like saying that instead of rating things out of a 100, you should rate them out of 70 instead. All you've done is narrow the scale.
For me, the small contrast on pages like HN (in particular with any of the gray text) strains my eyes because it’s more effort for me to see the letters.
But I also read a reasonable amount of PDFs (black on white) which is relatively comfortable on most of my monitors (LCDs with generally low brightness setting to have less light shine into my eyes).
I think what I am saying is, I agree that what is comfortable depends on the user, so websites not moving off the defaults is better, because then users can configure what works for them.
Addendum: The low contrast example on the article is very uncomfortable to read for me.
Given that screens are always adding their own light, it’s impossible for a screen to ever be equally bright as a piece of paper next to it. The screen will always be brighter.
Do what now? An entirely black OLED screen is certainly going to reflect less of the room’s light than a sheet of white paper. An OLED screen displaying white at 10% of its maximum brightness is also likely going to be less bright than a sheet of white paper in most rooms.
The contrast ratio of an old CRT (and amber and green were considered more comfortable than white-on-black) is radically different from a modern LCD/IPS/OLED screen. It's so different that there's no comparison. Dark mode might be ok for more people if there is some brightness to the background instead of being completely black, but then you lose most of the benefits of OLED.
The "true black" OLED displays have their part of the display off where there are black pixels, if I am not wrong. So, wouldn't dark mode suit well for those types of displays?
GP is arguing that exactly because there is no backlight, the contrast between on/off is uncomfortably high on modern screens compared to the CRTs where Windows 2/3 was running.
I agree. Most websites with a dark color scheme use a dark grey background and even off-white text.
Traditional normal is not an absolute statement. Sure DOS / Unix back in the early days of PC displayed black backgrounds due the display's at the time working better this way.
Before that, people shared information in white paper; and the beginning of the internet brought it back with black text over white background.
Therefore there is no canonical traditional normal, it all depends when one joined.
Paper and paper-like writing surfaces were non-white for a long time before we got bleached white paper.
We haven't yet had a glowing-white paper.
Traditional-normal for computing was a dark background.
There was likely a technological limit in the use of pure white at the start when "emulating" paper. VGA 16-color mode likely meant that the choice was between bright white and medium grey, which was too dark. Configurability has lagged behind though.
That was only common for a blip in time where NOTHING was normal because it was all being figured out and cost constraint, not personal or ergonomic preference, drove computing capabilities.
> Even GUI wise, Amiga used a dark-blue background as the default Workbench
That's because of cost. It was expected that many people would be viewing Amiga video output on a television via composite output and white-on-blue is something that TVs are good at displaying. The 1080 was like 1/3rd the cost of the A1000 and I'm willing to bet that many, MANY A500s were hooked up to TVs for at least a while after being opened on Christmas.
I used practically every word processor ever made for Amiga. Except for WordPerfect they were all black text-on-white, and WordPerfect you could change that they just kept the default blue and white to match DOS.
Dark mode was normal in the early days of CRTs, when most CRTs refreshed at 60Hz or lower. The dark background made the flicker less obvious. Once higher refresh rate CRTs became common (1990s), the flicker became less of a problem and light mode became the default.
...and Lotus 1-2-3 mimiced visicalc and when I used visicalc (on an HP85a) it had a dark background with a greyish white foreground colour. ie dark mode by default.
Mac likely did use this scheme, and yes, copied it from Xerox. However neither Macs nor Xerox had mainstream use. I'd only actually seen 3 Macs in the wild before their switch to Intel, over 20 years later.
Windows adopting the "paper"-white background and whole world drooling over the arrival of Windows 3.1 and 95 is when it became the standard, I think.
There's no 'likely' about it - the Mac absolutely used white as its background color for document windows and finder folders. It was striking and different when you first encountered one of the early compact Macs to see how white the screen was when you opened MacWrite.
As for the claim that Macs had no 'mainstream use' for 20 years until the Intel switch... your personal Mac-free life is a sad story, but not remotely universal, and while it's certainly true that Macs always had minority market share, it's insane to suggest they weren't influential.
My favorites were actually DOS TUIs, where for some reason blue became a commonly used background color for a lot of things (e.g. Norton Commander, many Borland products, FoxPro...).
Yeah, it wasn't Windows that changed it, they just hopped on the bandwagon.
I remember (SunOS)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS] on a SPARC in 1987 that was black in white text, and Macintosh before that.
> It was Microsoft Windows that changed the paradigm to default to a searing white display with black text in most apps
My early 90s Sun SPARCStation was black on white, right from the boot. The xterm default is black on white too, a default that far predates Windows AFAIK.
I don't really know the full history on all of this, but in my limited knowledge, this seems grossly simplified at best since there seem to have been several popular systems before Windows that used white background colours.
Athena text widgets on X were black on white in the 80's. So was Lisa, Mac, and NeXT, OS/X and SunOS's first GUI. Yes, amber on black was long running, but since you weren't alive then let me tell you something: it sucked. Moving from VT100 (VT104) terminals to actual Sun/Aix machines running X was a HUGE improvement on eye strain.
I’m glad those brightness settings work for you but I can’t deal with how dull it makes colors look on traditional backlit displays. The reduced contrast also isn’t very fun with modern UIs which for some reason actively avoid good contrast.
windows originated very little: plenty of type-on-page metaphor predated it.
original was light mode: printer terminals. yes, green-on-black became normal in the mid seventies, and some amber-on-black. but even early lisp machines, the Alto, Smalltalk, W/X/Andrew interfaces, Next, etc - type-on-page, not serial-terminal-ish dark mode.
Beside it not being true for paper it's also not true for electronic screens.
Before a computer with CRT most of us had some simpler screens on calculators or other devices that were LCDs. And they are blackish on some lighter gray or green - light mode.
Well hang on a sec. If a website is dark with light text and has just that one style, then that's it's theme, it's vibe. Dark mode only exists if there is a light mode, and give versa.
Don't force having to maintain two modes on websites who don't want to?
I think the poster was talking about phrasing, “dark mode” implies there are modes to switch. The article seems to incorrectly be conflating dark mode vs dark themes. Dark themes tend to be unadjustable.
IMHO I usually just flip to the reader mode on my phone browser or desktop browser when I don’t like the theme of a website. This obviously doesn’t work for all websites but it’s a nice work around since most reader modes allow you to adjust coloring yourself.
They actually are saying that nobody should have dark mode sites, except watered down ones.
What are these "dark-mode" (misnomer) sites that don't have a comfortable contrast ratio? I know there are some, but I think they're including a broad swath of primarily light-on-dark sites in this group.
Adjust the brightness on your screen.
X's is pretty good, the background is #000000 and there is some #ffffff content, the text is a bit farther from #ffffff than I'd like but pretty close. https://colorpalettecombos.netlify.app/
Curiously, the contrast ratio wasn't a good signal for me. The white on black text didn't strain my eyes but this did:
> However, light gray text on a dark gray background is easy on my eyes. Here the background is #666 and the text is #E0E0E0 which creates a contrast ratio of 4.34:1.
Github used to do this. The result is their dark mode isn't useful for anyone. However, They revamped their color scheme later and made it comfortable to read.
I agree with this. Default, unconfigurable light mode has been around for a while, and infrastructure like the Dark Reader plugin is around to address this. There is no such thing for light mode, though.
In my opinion, light mode is better than dark mode in most situations. The only situation dark mode is better than light mode is when you're sitting in a dark room with your screen as your only light source, and most of the time that's not really a healthy situation to be in. Dark mode is a crutch. Turn on a light or go to sleep.
Light mode might be annoying to read in no-light environments, but dark mode is nigh impossible to read in high-light environments. Ever try to read a dark mode UI on your phone on a bright summer's day? Can't read a thing, even with brightness cranked all the way up.
On my system, the dark reader plugin also has an option to force a light theme.
Actually, the browser has the ability to set a default background and foreground anyway, so this extension would be unnecessary if websites would behave properly and respect these defaults unless they really need to. We live in an unfortunate world where a “actually respect my preferences” extension is necessary, but since it is necessary, it should be noted that it covers both options. Overall the situation is pretty stupid but hey at least we’ve got workarounds, right?
Browsers shouldn't set a preferred colour scheme by default.
I think the prefers-color-scheme media query would be respected on more sites if by default it had the value "unset" or something, instead of defaulting to "light" or "dark".
I personally don't respect it on my sites for this reason. 99% of people visiting my sites won't actually have set this value themselves.
> The only situation dark mode is better than light mode is when you're sitting in a dark room with your screen as your only light source, and most of the time that's not really a healthy situation to be in. Dark mode is a crutch. Turn on a light or go to sleep.
It's always been strange to me how many people without a medical reason for doing so want to sit in dark rooms like cave trolls, but there we are.
At least now operating systems all have switchable modes that get reported to the browser. The browser can/should adapt to whatever setting the OS reports.
But UI design is, with a few islands of rationality in history from people like Paul Fitts, mostly a cascade of poorly applied vibes and fads. First people say that contrast is bad, so then people don't use enough contrast. Then people say that brightness is bad, so people don't use enough brightness. Then people realize why contrast and brightness were important all along and the circle of life continues.
> It's always been strange to me how many people without a medical reason for doing so want to sit in dark rooms like cave trolls, but there we are.
As a millennial, I grew up with rooms being lit by 1-3 relatively dim lampshaded 40-60w incandescent bulbs at night. As a result that’s what feels comfortable and relaxing to me as an adult. Rooms at home being brightly lit at night feels grating and reminiscent of a grocery store or hospital or something.
> Rooms at home being brightly lit at night feels grating and reminiscent of a grocery store or hospital or something.
Look into getting warm white lights. For some reason cool white lights are super common while I do think most people at home would actually prefer warm white.
Oh yeah, I’m a big fan of warm lights and have been using them for a while. Still don’t like them bright at night. Lights that are indirect (e.g. under counter) I can deal with being considerably brighter but for your typical table/floor lamp, 60W incandescent equivalent is the upper limit. I don’t like ceiling pot lights at all unless the bulb can be dimmed.
As a sibling comment expresses, it’s their unshaded nature. The light is too direct/harsh and can introduce glare. They can also wind up in peripheral vision easily, particularly when sitting down and looking up at someone standing or at an object high on the wall.
Indirect/shaded lamps that diffuse the light over a larger area and reduce its intensity are preferable.
> It's always been strange to me how many people without a medical reason for doing so want to sit in dark rooms like cave trolls, but there we are.
Because screens are not bright enough to use outside or in well-lit environments.
If E-ink or similar technology manages to get a bit better refresh rates, it's going to change building architecture in the entire industrialized world.
I'll grant you outside, because the power of the sun is immense, but they're definitely bright enough to use in any well-lit indoor environment. Do you mean if the lights are behind your head instead of overhead? That's either bad lighting or bad ergonomics, and I'm sorry if you must suffer through that. That sucks.
An ergonomic screen arrangement, with the display placed such that you're not looking downward at it, should make it basically impossible for an overhead indoor light to interfere with your view.
> If E-ink or similar technology manages to get a bit better refresh rates, it's going to change building architecture in the entire industrialized world.
Fingers crossed. I remember yearning for the breakout of transflective displays that never happened.
I don't think I phrased that right. What I mean is environments with a lot of natural light, for example from big windows. Or a café without walls to the outside, letting the sunlight in, but not right overhead. I guess this kind of architecture is not so common in colder countries, now that I think of it.
The sun is tyrannical where I live, so with current display technology, offices are indeed built somewhat like caves.
As someone that had cataracts, light mode was very hard to read. It was like looking directly into high beams. I used a dark reader plugins that was alright, but was not the same as a site designed to support dark mode.
I feel kind of traumatized for years of forced light mode everywhere. It hurts my eyes.
In bright sun when outside, I use light mode. Allmost everywhere else, I won't. So please @everyone thinking like this, don't assume, what is best for me, because your taste is different.
A difficulty is that the appropriate screen brightness varies with the content it's displaying. Going from a low-contrast dark site to a white background is especially jarring.
With a properly set monitor and gamma setting there is no issue with switching between light and dark mode at all (even in a pitch black room at night). I use it regularly, I prefer light mode but I also use dark mode for stuff like terminals. So I switch a lot between these.
Your proposal is to decrease the dynamic range of the display. This will certainly achieve the goal of making switching between light and dark backgrounds more comfortable, but makes it worse for viewing photographs or videos. It's also not ideal when doing any amount of design, as most viewers won't have their screens set up the same way.
Photographs and videos seems allright to me, maybe I'm just used to it. I like that the dark regions are visible (esp. when IPS LCDs have not that great blacks due to the backlight).
I always hated it on CRTs where photographs were too dark, had to use a really big gamma correction on them (2.5), I guess I've got used to it from these times because it was a necessity to be compatible with LCDs.
The photos and videos are more dull when compared to a reality, but consistent with other stuff on the screen. I have no problem doing color stuff for things like textures, website design etc. The relative comparison to other material is enough for me. I've been working with graphics designers with calibrated monitors and didn't get any complaints.
But I don't do anything that requires working with calibrated monitors, like printing. Though it's hard to tell if it would be an issue. You need to do test prints anyway. You have to use specific named colors (Pantone). Based on that you can just imagine how it would look, no need to have it precisely shown all the time.
Or from text and diagrams (which often contain large single-color areas) to photos and videos. The default HN color scheme looks much brighter than the bright daylight photo I currently have as a desktop background.
Yeah, most people use their screens with brightness cranked up and then wonder why they have all sort of problems.
The trick is to set a low brightness, in my case it's a little below what you would call comfortable, but that's because you adapt to it in a sec and will be perceived as good.
If you can't set it too low on the monitor, set brightness to 0 and lower the contrast. If it's still too bright use also brightness/contrast controls in your GPU settings. It is also needed to adjust the settings during the day. But having a more controlled light in your room is a better option.
Once you start getting comments from others that they can't see shit on your screen then you've set the correct level :)
Another very often forgotten thing is to set up correct gamma correction! Yes that thing from CRTs is often needed on LCDs too! LCDs can produce quite big contrast which is unpleasant, for example I set mine to 1.3, fixed it nicely for me.
One approach to find a good value is to have antialiased text both in white-on-black and black-on-white and switching between these. Once the apparent thickness is the same then you've got the right value. Beware of ClearType settings though, you may need to do the test with a classic antialiasing instead.
The result is that you can comfortably use light mode in total dark room without any issues.
Yeah monitor controls can be a problem. You can download an utility to set it from the computer, it's much more comfortable. I'm using one from my monitor vendor, but there are also generic ones.
Search for utilities that can set the monitor using DDC (Display Data Channel).
I like Pure Black mode because the black pixels actually turn off on my screens, making it much more pleasant to look at. Even in broad daylight! I wish Pure Black mode was an option separate from Dark and Light mode, like it is on some Android apps. For now I get by by minimizing brightness in Dark Reader, but it is a bit clunky.
> Light mode might be annoying to read in no-light environments, but dark mode is nigh impossible to read in high-light environments.
Backlit screens are difficult to read in high-light environments regardless of whether you're reading black text on white or white text on black. I use white-on-black ("dark mode") on my e-ink Kindle to read outside all the time. And the same is true on our Daylight computer. White-on-black remains my preference in high-light environments.
Are you confusing the brightness setting on the display with "dark" and "light" mode? Because I always have the brightness on my monitors at max when the lights are on. I practically never change it.
As a software developer, who codes about 15 hours a day (day job and personal projects), I ditched "light mode" many years ago as it's too harsh on my eyes to be staring at a bright white screen that many hours a day. Dark mode is far easier to look at for long periods of time.
I have no trouble reading code in dark mode in a well lit room. If it were difficult to read, it wouldn't last 15 minutes for my needs. I don't code in "D4rK M0D3" in the dark, I'm not a l337 H4CK3r.
>Ever try to read a dark mode UI on your phone on a bright summer's day?
Phone in direct sunlight is one thing. That isn't the way most people use devices, that's a more rare use case than sitting at a desk 8 hours a day staring at a bright screen. There are also high-contrast modes for eyesight challenged people, which can be used effectively in bright sunlight too, but I'm not going to code that way for hours a day if I don't really need to. Phones and other devices also have adaptive brightness, so if you are in a dark room the phone's display brightness is going to be dimmer automatically, and I'm not really sure you know the difference between "dark mode" and "brightness turned down". So using a phone screen and high contrast required for using screens in direct bright sunlight is a poor example to support your argument. Maybe you also need to qualify all of your arguments with "on a mobile device in bright sunlight", because that isn't the main use case for "dark mode".
> I ditched "light mode" many years ago as it's too harsh on my eyes to be staring at a bright white screen that many hours a day. [...] I always have the brightness on my monitors at max when the lights are on.
If your screen at the brightest setting hurts your eyes, why would you use it like that?
I enjoy the full brightness of the display when it calls for it, when watching videos or video games, when the screen isn't 99% full-on white pixels. I also enjoy the crispness and contrast of white text on a dark background when the display brightness is at maximum. No, I do not enjoy using a display at low brightness, and I really don't like being blasted by full-on white background with dark text on it all day every day.
> The only situation dark mode is better than light mode is when you're sitting in a dark room with your screen as your only light source
It's really not that extreme. Dark mode is more comfortable as soon as it's dark outside (this time of year that starts between 3 and 4 pm) unless I'm flooding my entire room with enough light to replace the sunlight. I still have the lights on, but none of that light is as bright/white as an average white webpage. Even with screen brightness turned down and a blue light filter, an all-white webpage is usually just too much white.
> Light mode might be annoying to read in no-light environments, but dark mode is nigh impossible to read in high-light environments.
This is just completely opposite for me. Reading in dark mode is only uncomfortable if there's sunlight basically directly behind the screen, while light mode is only really comfortable in high-light environments.
Nah some of us need dark mode 24x7 and actually benefit from it even in broad daylight. Not fair to make this assertion and assume everyone is like you.
Light/Dark modes at their extremes are both annoying. White on black or black on white are both to extreme. The best solution IMO are mid-level colors. I personally prefer the schemes with darker grey backgrounds and lighter grey (or other lighter color) foreground, but the opposite isn't bad either. What are bad is that the default light modes are generally much to light. A random site I have open right now has a background color of #f2f2f2 w/ text color of #151515, it is only tolerable to read if I have my monitor red-shifted to around 4200 degrees (in a well lit room w/ lots of natural light).
Sleep hygiene. I'm in college and I know too many people that waste away online until 3am and are always tired and then down coffee after coffee during the day.
Just because someone stays up till 3AM (which I have done for years), doesn't mean they need to sleep less or feel always tired. This has nothing to do with using computer in dark room which is possible even at 3PM.
Also, I don't drink coffee (less than 5 times a year). There are plenty of people who sleep at proper time and still drink a lot of coffee all day.
> sitting in a dark room with your screen as your only light source
is also really not great for your eyes, in the same way that having a bright light source in your field of vision (e.g. a window without blackout shades directly behind your monitor) isn't either.
I'm using computers/TV/Phones in dark room, on an average 12h+ a day, for ~20 years. My eyes are just fine. Last time (and only time) I went to an eye doctor two years ago because people like you keep saying my eyes are damaged, the doctor asked me why am I wasting my money going to eye doctor.
I use dark mode during the day in rooms with lots of natural light spilling in because that’s what’s felt better to me ever since we collectively decided that light themes need to use stark white and very light grays instead of the mid-grays dappled with mid-colors that used to be popular. Dark mode is a bandaid for the needlessly bright themes that became the norm with the advent of flat design.
I use dark mode in a (moderately) lit room, because it makes me focus better. Even colorschemes can affect my state of mind and make it work differently. I’m not even talking about effectiveness here, just comfort, although they correlate. I can’t just choose light mode.
When screen is too dark (sunlight, etc), I make it brighter. Requires >=400 nit or whatever that unit is for an average day.
> Light mode might be annoying to read in no-light environments, but dark mode is nigh impossible to read in high-light environments. Ever try to read a dark mode UI on your phone on a bright summer's day? Can't read a thing, even with brightness cranked all the way up.
This. once stuck outside with limited battery and tried switching to light mode. could instantly reduce brightness and still see everything.
the nature of lcd display makes it hard to display contrast without backlighting. but the early ones could be effective by showing dark details on a blank slate. this situation brought back my appreciation for having this mode.
All the dark mode extensions I've used also would work for making pages light mode.
For me, I have trouble focusing when reading light mode content, but dark mode is perfectly fine (light backgrounds seem not still, as if there is movement, and this effect lessens the darker the background is.
In my experience, high contrast dark mode is readable in high-light environments, but it causes the issue the images in the article show.
Beyond that, I have no preferences between light and dark modes on laptop screens and smaller. But I prefer having at least some dark elements visible on large screens, because floaters can be distracting against large bright surfaces. Usually it's a terminal window with the traditional light gray on black color scheme, but I tend to use dark mode in IDEs and other full-screen apps.
Yeah their actual point is about contrast ratio, which makes the headline a bit disingenuous.
Ironically they end by saying they'll use an invert filter as a workaround, while for those who prefer dark mode if doing the same on the author's own stark white bg/black text site (such as Vivaldi's 'Invert Mode') will produce the very contrast ratio in dark they're complaining about :p
Please don't force low contrast ratios on users. Not everyone is calibrated to >100 nits and viewing your content in a bright but sensible ambient environment
The recommended grey-on-grey may be unreadably low in contrast when viewed on, for example, 0 brightness in a pitch black room, or in direct sunlight
The full SDR colour range is there to be used, this isn't HDR where you need to limit things to not blind your users
Not just light vs. dark. I wish web sites would respect my system's preferences in general. If my OS theme is purple Comic Sans text on top of a yellow brick wall background, then my browser should respect that. I want to read text using the full width of the browser rather than a tiny 5 inch column down the middle of it, I shouldn't have to perform wizardry in the browser settings, conjure up some overriding CSS, or install extensions to do this. The browser should just say "tough shit, web developer, the user's preference wins."
Browsers have handed over way too much control to developers to ignore what the user wants. So much for being a "user agent." Browsers are more like the developer's agent.
Well, there's not much you can do about yellow background, but forcing Comic Sans is as easy as setting it as your preferred font and then deselecting "Allow pages to choose their own fonts", at least in the Firefox settings page.
This is what I do and it makes browsing the web so much better.
Yes, and too many applications go out of their way to ignore user preferences on desktop, too! It's a major problem IMO. The user should be in charge of their computer.
Too many web developers assume everyone loves Dark Mode, default to that, and defend their choice by pointing to the toggle button that says Dark/Light Mode. I’m surprised many, even with freshly done websites, still do not pick up on the user’s preferences and are set to it!
For developers, the `color-scheme` CSS property allows an element to indicate which color schemes it can comfortably be rendered in.[1]
:root {
color-scheme: light dark;
}
element { light-dark(light-color-code, dark-color-code);
For users on macOS, I like dark mode in some cases, such as the Menubar and the IDE, but light for other activities, such as reading, writing, and browsing. Hence, it is a mixed preference;
System Preferences, then set the theme to LIGHT, then run
YES! I cannot understand the grey on grey on grey anti-readability obsession. I cannot stand it. It's ugly and hard to read. I wish we'd all just stop doing it.
Dark mode was a mistake. Early LCDs were dim so everyone cranked up the whites to make up for it. Now LCDs have caught up and it burns a significant number of peoples eyes, so we increasingly have to support two modes. Apples comically ugly dark mode icons shows how hard this is to do well.
I think the ideal thing to do would be to move back to greys as the base color for computer interfaces, like we had when bright CRTs were the norm. This has the added advantage of allowing depth affordances in UI elements, which we should also bring back.
> The whole point is it should be configurable so users can set their preference.
Yeah, but it uses too many resources on my 4.4GHz Ryzen with 32GB of RAM. I wonder how Apollo was able to do this on a 20 MHz 68020 with 4MB of RAM while running a network distributed multiuser, multitasking OS. /s
CRTs also had easily adjustable brightness and contrast dials, so everyone could always quickly adjust to their preferred setting for black on white or vice versa.
Regarding the BeOS screenshot: mind that this is not regular BeOS, but the OS X-like "Baqua" appearance of the eOS 5.1d0 developer release, which never saw a regular release.
(I'm taking no offence, but it may be important to point out what's what, now that image references are becoming as inevitably as increasingly unreliable, as for "AI".)
I'm glad this article included an example of what happens to their eyes when they read text in dark mode. I get the same afterimages and it's incredibly disorienting when it happens and dark mode makes it way worse than normal. As an aside, does anyone know if that effect has a name?
Yes, I am glad to see this post, because I had the sentiment to be alone with this ‘symptom’.
Can’t bear dark mode, it give me disorientation and nausea.
I wasn’t able to explain this to my ophthalmologist.
Dark Reader turns dark mode sites light, if you want.
You can control the contrast ratio on dark mode websites with the "brightness" control on your monitor. It changes the emissivity of the pixels. Turning it down keeps black the same color and makes whites blacker. Monitors typically ship with the white level way too high for any real work (it looks good in the computer store though), and so you should probably always be turning this down.
Thanks for posting this, it's an interesting perspective that I hadn't considered before. Ideally, sites would respect user preferences such as prefers-color-scheme and prefers-reduced-motion. And, in fact, I just checked MDN and see there is prefers-contrast:
No, please do force dark mode. This will make the dark mode people think they have won. They will act accordingly. And then the pendulum will swing back, as the pendulum always does.
But the difference this time is that because the dark mode people are wrong, and always have been, and always will be, when the pendulum swings back, it will swing hard, for it will swing with the momentum of righteousness and truth, and the repercussions will ring through history.
Ask yourself: where will you be standing, when this happens?
What is that supposed to mean? Some people find it more pleasant to read on a dark background (e.g. because of photophobia), some prefer it for aesthetic reasons (e.g. for a site about space exploration), how is that ‘wrong’?
Personally I prefer light mode, but when using dark theme, for example in the IDE or terminal, I always manually set white brightness to 255 (max). For example Putty and other apps, come with default theme 192 on black and that is unreadable. Double so if someone is sharing their screen. Dark mode is already harder on the eyes and harder to focus, and making it less contrast makes it even harder to read.
PS: unless you are adhering to a system default, you better include options for everyone, not just one demographic. For example after recent redesign ArsTechnica has created a selection of different modes. And while some people like darker mode, I'm happily using "hyperlight" because it is easier to read for me.
I actually prefer text as #fff and background as #000. Lower contrast just seems harder to read. I suppose it depends on brightness setting.
Also from an article in Nature.
“Impact of text contrast polarity on the retinal activity in myopes and emmetropes using modified pattern ERG” 09 July 2023.
“Recently, reading standard black-on-white text was found to activate the retinal OFF pathway and induce choroidal thinning, which is associated with myopia onset. Contrarily, reading white-on-black text led to thicker choroids, being protective against myopia. Respective effects on retinal processing are yet unknown.”
I miss the days when interfaces didn't have to be light white on white or dark black on black. When people thought about contrast and things looked interesting. Discord is my go-to example with this. Before the dark/light craze, their sidebar had a dark background and the chat was a white background. It was great and provided contrast and delineation between different parts of the app. When they added "dark mode", they changed it to be light gray and white, making everything worse. Luckily they added an option to bring back the previous theme, albeit buried in the accessibility section.
This whole "dark mode" thing only happened because Apple removed all color and affordances from their interface in iOS 7, and then Mac OS later. They set computer interface design back decades with that decision.
For people complaining about "light mode", please just turn down your brightness. Your screen does not need to be at 10,000 nits when you are anywhere but in direct sunlight.
Instead of writing this shortsighted article, just do like those of us who are forced to endure light mode, and install Dark Reader(https://darkreader.org) that also does light mode.
I used to love dark mode when I was younger but now the bright white text on black background is murder on my eyes with astigmatism, it's like driving at night.
Seems like a fashion thing, but the Linux distribs I've recently checked out all defaulted to a dark mode. Fine for night but a pain to read normally :(
Contrast ratios don’t go away in light mode. The contrast ratio of black-on-white is the same as white-on-black.
Curious then what is the real driver of these issues? If accessibility teaches us anything, it’s that there’s certainly no one size fits all. But it’s gonna be hard to update the standards or make plugins/tweaks successfully unless we get at the root of it.
> Contrast ratios don’t go away in light mode. The contrast ratio of black-on-white is the same as white-on-black.
WCAG is known to be inaccurate for dark mode because contrast ratios do change when you switch the color order. See this improved way to measure contrast that takes this into account:
At least on iOS there is beside the normal dark mode also some kind of simulated dark mode that inverts everything that's still light, expect images. There same is not available for people preferring light mode.
I think this is something browsers should enforce. Different people may have different preferences for what they consider comfortable contrast ratios, and the tool in the stack that directly serves the user, is the browser. And even if websites should consider proper design, browsers should also enforce user preferences, because badly designed websites will probably always exist.
I'd suggest browsers come out of the box with a decent contrast range that they will use to display text, but users should be able to modify those settings. In general, browsers should be a lot more willing to override bad webdesign ideas. They already block popups and blink tags; there's plenty of other behaviour they simply shouldn't tolerate from websites.
Wondering whether the author has some kind of odd medical condition, and how common his experience is. The after-image symptom he describes is decidedly peculiar.
I can't say that I share his opinion. I find dark-mode preferable under pretty much all circumstances, and often find myself flinching when switching to a site with a fully white background.I also find it easier to read ebooks in dark mode when in full sunlight when reading on my tablet -- also the opposite of his preference. And I'm wondering whether perhaps he needs to turn down the brightness on his monitor.
I've never quite seen a stupid trend in web design take off like dark mode did. Maybe because it's just the ultimate perfect bike shed; something so completely inane and pointless, yet superficially dramatic, that it can be given entire meetings and dev cycles and treated like something important, when it's just 3 lines of CSS. It has become the very first thing anyone requests in a new application, and I have now seen countless entire sprints deficated to implementing it in different more complicated ways every time in each new app. Really bizarre.
I like the proposal to have gray background at least. Glaring white is too much. I like reading HN because background is not glaring. For my taste it could be even a bit darker but it is good enough.
How comes this isn't obvious to someone they should just respect the OS/browser settings and use the color scheme the user chose?
I prefer black on white (and dream of a eInk-only laptop and a perfectly lo-fi UI with no unnecessary elements/decorations/effects) because that feels more ADHD-friendly to me. Dark modes look cool and make sense when you work in the dark, as long as you set the text font color to grey rather than bright white/green/whatever. The user should choose, using a single system-wide switch.
It's funny, the author says the high contrast hurts his eyes, but for many visually impaired users (myself included), light mode is like a blinding white light that's very hard to look at while dark mode is very comfortable while still having high contrast.
IMO every website should have a native dark & light mode theme. There is a browser extension, Dark Reader, which changes the CSS to force dark (or light) mode but it can be really hit or miss depending on how the site was coded.
We've again came to full circle, with so many posts damning "no dark mode" sites back then. Maybe there is enough audience now for a "BrightReader" browser extension?
> pure white text on a pitch black background can strain my eyes and be very difficult to read. […] However, light gray text on a dark gray background is easy on my eyes.
For me it’s the opposite, I need maximum contrast. It’s a pity we can’t just have default text color on default background color, and everyone can adjust their browser to their preferred colors. While there is reader mode and plugins that try their best, they don’t work consistently, because HTML and CSS is such a mess.
It seems much easier for terminal and IDE apps to choose background colors to apply to sections of code when your app background is light; with a dark app background it seems harder to find pairs of text bg and fg colors that are clearly distinguishable and also distinguishable from the app background. That said, I'm the author of an app with this challenge so would love help/suggestions on this front. (Is there any theoretical reason for it to be true?)
The only reason I have started to use `eww` in Emacs to "read the web" is because people pushing those amounts of dark on everybody, it has become unbearable!
I'm more extreme, I dislike all dark mode, including code. Shreds my eyes, no idea why. Have tried a zillion themes, just can't be one of the cool kids.
Funny I have just the opposite problem. And so I use a dark reader add-on in Firefox to force light sites, and curse any app that only provides a light theme.
"iMessage" has dark mode. Anytime I send a picture it shows up in reverse when in dark mode.
I don't really care what other people prefer, software manufacturers with any more than a few users need to test all permutations. This is a minor annoyance but gives a clear indication that there isn't good testing even with one of the most used apps with a huge user base.
I don't agree. I have the same problem described on the article; I can't read websites with white text over a pitch black background. My eyes hurt after a while. At the same time, I use a dark theme on my IDE, but it feels like it's better on my eyes for some reason.
That’s because the dark theme of your IDE also uses lower contrast. Which makes it hard to read for other parts of the population, even if they otherwise like dark mode. Contrast should be a user setting.
I’m dating myself, but this was all so easy with CRT monitors, which had a simple analog contrast dial, and everyone just set it to their preferred level.
What really annoys is web-sites that force dark mode without an option to switch to light mode. There MUST be an obvious switch option when a web-site forces or offers dark mode—what matters is for a user to be able to change the mode. It's simple common sense and respectful to users.
I even more so would need a switch for anything on my screen, not just websites, including screen sharing. It's fine for anyone having a preference, but I like light-mode and being in a well-lit environment for work, if not even outside. When then someone shares their screen in dark-mode I can read nothing.
For some reason, dark mode sites seem to come with monospaced fonts, usually Courier.
I suspect that the next thing will be HaloLite 2.0, where a ring of light appears around the screen.[1] There are TV backlights.[2] Backlights that follow the screen color.[3] There is at least one phone with backlights.[4]
Please don't force light mode either. :) My astigmatism means that I find dark mode on backlit screens to be far more readable. For proper accessibility, include both and respect the browser/OS user preference accordingly. Allow the user to override that on a per-app basis if you're feeling fancy.
I find this hard to understand. I find that ghosting due to my astigmatism is far more effectively hidden with light themes. More extreme dark themes tend to be illegible as light ghosting stands out against dark backgrounds.
It also depends a bit on how long ago I had my prescription changed and how much I was able to convince the doctor to do a good job.
Graybeard opinion: most sites shouldn't deal at all with colors.
Just write plain html [0] and let your users choose.
Default browser styles are not only stylish, they are also accessible and responsive by default.
Simplest thing is to have light and dark mode themes, use whatever the user has set for their system settings, and also have a toggle to switch between light and dark. You may like dark mode for most things you browse but then would prefer something in light mode.
The problem with this is that you now have 2x the UX testing to make sure everything is useable and looks aesthetically pleasing. Probably OK for a large website, but as a solo entrepreneur, that ends up adding a lot of overhead.
I feel old, having black as the background is not "Dark mode", it's the default. In many cases I can understand the sentiment, but the default for background is no colour, I think for all hardware, that means not emitting anything
The dark reader extension can force a light theme as well. It would be more properly named the “respect my theme preferences for real” extension. It is a bit annoying that it is necessary.
Just created an account to say that I have that same eye condition and indeed, looking at content with high contrast ratios (mostly with whitish typography against dark backgrounds) gets REALLY uncomfortable after a couple minutes.
> Upcoming WCAG 3.0 adds a new exploratory requirement for “Maximum text contrast” and I hope the working committee will address the issue of high contrast text in dark mode and provide suitable recommendations.
APCA is a proposed replacement contrast calculation that was in discussions for WCAG 3 that mentions a maximum contrast value to avoid eye strain like this (https://www.myndex.com/APCA/, I'm getting SSL errors right now though).
I wrote an accessible palette creator tool where you can switch between WCAG 2 and APCA contrast checking to see how they compare (go to "... > Flip to dark/light palette" to explore a dark mode palette):
Along with not having a maximum recommended contrast, WCAG 2 is also meant to be really inaccurate at measuring dark mode contrast, where it'll say colors contrast well when they don't. APCA is meant to fix both these problems.
I am free to ignore these websites if I don't find them easy to read, I can use reader mode, modify their css or disable css altogether if I am not happy, as everyone else.
The solution – as always – when it comes to problems with usability is to set your browser to open all websites in Reader view by default. Then every website will always be presented in the way you prefer.
No, there's not “a few exceptions”. It's really rather common for aites not to display in Reader Mode at all; far too common to be called “exceptions”, and nowhere near “a few”.
Not particlularly angry (at you, not at all; at web sites, a little), just a very different experience than yours: Many articles I come across refuse to display in reader view.
What's "forced reader view"? If I could force it (and get a readable result every time), there'd be no reason to be even a little angry.
Press CMD+Shit+R to force reader view, it usually works if it's an article. On iPhone I think you can force reader view by long pressing the reader button on the side of the URL bar.
Can’t all of these things be said about light mode too? I find dark mode considerably better and would rather all sites offered a choice, especially the author’s!
/* Dark mode */
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
...
}
The issue with both dark and light modes is so many designers seem to have jumped onto the idea that colour schemes have to be either bright white or darkest black.
I'd much rather see colours that are 'slightly darker' at night and 'slightly lighter' in the daytime. For one thing there are still so many websites with no colour schemes setup at all so if you avoid going to extremes it minimises the contrast difference.
The other issue is many sites don't use that CSS media query at the minimum for auto setting the theme. They instead use a Javascript approach that often involves local storage/cookies even if no choice is made, which doesn't work if those are blocked and/or Javascript disabled. In such cases the default theme is forced.
The optimal approach is applying the appropriate `prefers-color-scheme` using CSS alone, while additionally allowing a theme override using JS/storage. Fewer do this though, even though it wouldn't require any cookies and thus no consent dialog.
The worst are sites that only have theme switching gated behind registration.
The truth is that you need to do device detection, so the @prefers CSS stuff, then you need to have a toggle to over-ride things. Then you need some javascript to store the preference in local storage.
On page load you get your javascript to check the mode and check the override to add a class to the whole page. It is this class that implements the desired light or dark theme.
Fighting against you is what the browser is doing. You can put a meta tag in to force it to respect one theme or the other so it does not go freestyling.
People that have a page permanently set to light mode (or dark mode) have put in the meta tag but they haven't done the extra work to implement some meaningful choice.
In summary, there is auto, where the browser does its best, one mode enforced with a meta tag, then a full solution where there is a pretty button on the page and some javascript to honour the preference, keeping the preference in local storage.
Bonus points for adding an event observer to detect the change in preferences from outside the browser or in dev tools.
More bonus points for having no FOUC.
Extra, extra bonus points, is to implement not just a 'dark mode', but a DARK mode. In light mode everything is kittens and rainbows, whereas in dark mode the content is kind of gruesome and 'dark'. Any subject can be treated this way, a page on say, watermelons could be full of tasty recipe ideas in light mode, but, in dark mode, it could be about dropping them off tall buildings with busy streets below...
It's worse than that please don't force dark mode even if my system has dark mode enabled.
I don't want the primary background color of my computer to be dark as I'm browsing the web but I want only the periphery control items like the browser address bar, etc. to be dark.
I have the Dark Reader extension to dim white backgrounds only at night.
At least some browsers have a setting to report a different preference to websites than the system setting. That really belongs on the user-agent level.
I think the more specific argument is to avoid sudden changes in brightness.
Neither dark mode nor light mode is the one true “main” option. We had dark mode for a long time with terminals. Then light mode a long time with word processors and the web and OSes. And now we kinda have both.
Also; because system mode happens to be dark, doesn't mean that the users would like dark mode by default. Every dark mode is not equal, and I'd like to start with light mode if possible.
The last time this topic came up on here, via a different article, the majority of commenters chose to gaslight the author and continue insisting dark mode is the only valid style.
Your light mode privilege is showing but seriously, maybe instead of writing an article with a tone about everything that's wrong with a preference you have you could instead. do what every dark mode user has done and like you said.. just override the css. And then write an article with a tone about how you accomplished it. This just feels like complaining for the sake of complaining.
It's not a "mode" if it's just the design. The amount of whining from people who get "uncomfortable" when exposed to dark/light designs is pathetic. What an utterly stupid thing to complain about.
I don't know, but I have the exact same issue. White text on a black background actually hurts my eyes after a paragraph of reading, and then when I look away I see those grey bands across my vision for the next 20 seconds. As soon as I land on such a page, I either immediately back out or, if it's a subject I really want to read, I go to Safari and turn on reader mode.
I have the exact same issue too and wish I had a name for it. I had been assuming it was related to astigmatism since I also have issues with low-light environments especially with reflections (e.g. hate watching TV in a dark room, don't like driving at night especially in rain) but it seems like others who have this issue aren't mentioning it so now I'm doubting that.
A little bummed seeing how hostile most of the comments here are but I guess it's to be expected if most commenters are seeing very differently than how I and the author are.
I suffer from the same issue and I've always assumed it was astigmatism as well. There are different types of astigmatism so perhaps some types have this issue and some don't? I'm unsure, but I know that dark mode is legitimately hard for me to read.
exactly. perhaps a case of their eyes and screen refresh rate being incompatible. something smells undiagnosed. whatever it may be, definitely a PEBCAK issue
From early green or amber text on black mono displays. Grey on black DOS text mode. Light Blue on Dark Blue C-64. Apple 2's grey/white (I don't recall) on black. Even GUI wise, Amiga used a dark-blue background as the default Workbench, with user selectable palettes for everything.
It was Microsoft Windows that changed the paradigm to default to a searing white display with black text in most apps, like Notepad, Word, etc., because "it's more like paper". Sure, paper is white, but it's not glowing white. That transition was painful.
I'm glad to see dark-modes return, I agree there needs to be an option, not just forced dark-mode. Preferably light mode options to use a not-as-bright-as-possible white too.