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Ask HN: Wouldn't greymode be better than darkmode?

1 points by bythckr ↗ HN
I don't mean the greyscale option in OS, where the whole page is turned to greyscale.

Dark mode is tough to implement, you have to re-design the whole page and it doesn't render well in old type screens (Thinkpad Matte, LCD). To properly view darkmode you need Retina like display.

The strain part is the bright white light, why not just modify that? Turn the white to grey. Renders well on all screens, no need to redesign the page. Plus less strain on the eyes.

Wouldn't that be a better alternative than darkmode?

4 comments

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howard941
I don't know. Would it? It's hard to answer without links to sites with the same thing rendered both ways.

For what little it's worth I got pushed into VS editor (which shouldn't have taken pushing, it's a great environment) defaulting to darkmode and on less-than-Retina-grade panels I'm enjoying it

Finnucane
You'd have to make sure there's still enough contrast. The way book printers deal with the problem is to use unbleached 'natural' paper for long books, instead of bright-white paper. (Not entirely unlike the background color of HN).
anigbrowl
You know what I'd like? Not to have to set this stuff individually for every client. I greatly miss the ability to customize my own machine and have most of what was on my screen look the way I liked. The web broke all that; publishers (especially commercial entities) started recruiting designers to make their offerings stand out, and all the good design work that used to go into software UI went towards publishing, turning the internet from the worlds greatest library into the world's largest magazine rack. Ubiquitous video has made it exponentially worse; 9 out of 10 moving images I see are noise trying to sell me something - probably more, in fact.
bythckr
Yup, that's a much better way. Give the data, the system will render it the way needed.

Even is darkmode, the issue is some rogue sites that manage to escape the browser extension to force darkmode on all sites and comes out all bright. That sudden flash of light just renders me blind.