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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Because Apple realized that the visual appearance of the OSX desktop is an aspect of their brand, and every person working on a MacBook in a coffee shop is a public billboard which needs to adhere to brand standards.
>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.
Circa 2008 I used KDE 4 with a dark UI theme (one of the predefined color schemes) and it worked perfectly in 99% of applications. Sure you have a few oddballs (cough Java cough), but all Qt-based or GTK-based apps adopted the colorscheme without any issues.
Custom colors worked in the vast majority of the post-95 Windows apps I ever used. Some of them did custom theming that ignored system colors, but a lot of those had swappable themes so you could just get a custom theme that was dark. GTK and QT all typically obeyed Windows system colors when I used apps built with those. I don't know for certain that the JVM's UI toolkits obeyed them, but I'm pretty sure they did.
The Windows "high contrast" accessibility mode relied on system colors so you would expect them to work.
The modern hell era of 'every UI element is a png file' is specifically the fault of Apple who caused it (with iOS's gaudy visual style that could not be efficiently rasterized using vector graphics by the average developer) and reinforced it with the way they handled the introduction of Retina displays (adding specific tooling to support tons of massive resolution-specific pngs that developers then shipped in their apps)
System colors were very easy to tap into using VB6, Delphi, VB.Net, C#, etc. If people weren't obeying system colors they just didn't care about obeying user intent or about helping people with visual impairment.
> I certainly don't. Do you have a specific OS in mind?
Windows from 1.0 - ME, for example, would let you customize the color, font, and size of just about any thing you wanted. Starting with Luna In XP and forward, you got a few choices of themes, but you weren't really able to change all the decorations to whatever you wanted. Windows 10, for example, won't let you change the color of the text in window title bars without hacking the registry
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.
> Why has the GUI so dramatically regressed from 1995?
(1) Mobile caused a generation to at least temporarily sideline all interest in desktop UIs to focus on phones, causing desktop UI to reach near-abandonware status. This seems to be changing now that it's clear that the mobile phone as currently implemented is not going to replace or grow to encompass desktop's role in computing.
(2) There has been an explosion of desktop UI libraries and rendering engines with the web rendering engine (Electron and similar) being the most popular. All these different engines have their own notions of styling and color defaults and theming, causing unification of the desktop to break down. This is largely the fault of desktop OS vendors for failing to offer a unified platform or keep their platforms up to date, forcing people to seek alternatives.
The triumph of Facebook over MySpace has been attributed, repeatedly, to the customizability of MySpace, and how relatively unpleasant the result of that was. I would say the same is true of customizing Windows.
Me, I love being able to switch from Solarized to Solarized Dark to keep track of which window is which app, and I think Apple could provide slightly more customization than they do, but if the choice is between Windows 3 and no-dark-mode-just-a-tiny-accent-color, I'll take the latter every time.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
The best thing to do is to hook into the system-level preference, which all major OSes have now. From there the user can usually opt to have the system-wide theme change based on time of day if that's what they want.
Not noticing differences in readability between light mode and dark mode is consistent with the studies!
"Interestingly, even though their performance was better in the light mode, participants in the study did not report any difference in their perception of text readability (e.g., their ability to focus on text) in light versus dark mode — which only reinforces the first rule of usability: don’t listen to users."
True, although I also question the value of "performance" differences that are small enough to go unnoticed. Maybe it's due to filling in visual gaps by context (complete words, meaning of the sentence, etc.), but I think I would notice if the text I'm reading were regularly making it all the way up to higher mental processes with the wrong meaning.
I often work on color sensitive stuff and I really like dark mode for these occasions, because my sexondary display won't shine a strong white-ish light into my face from the side.
From a standpoint of readability there is not much difference for me either. Sometimes dark themes just get less love in design, because just flipping the colors usually doesn't cut it. A bright font on a dark background needs a tiny bit more wheight to look pleasing.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadBut 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.
I use Materialistic on mobile, and it has a dark theme. On web, I just use a dark theme extension for sites in general.
Cascadea CSS Script: https://gist.github.com/1player/af5f02ccbe7c930f793fc104c999...
Not perfect, tested on Safari, gets the job done. Changes automatically based on your system preferences (light during the day, dark after sunset)
Samsung's Internet browser has a Dark Mode toggle built in, which surprised me.
WindowBlinds[0] on Windows XP was extremely customizable. I remember the top community themes were usually dark and minimalist ones.
[0] https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb5/
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.
The Windows "high contrast" accessibility mode relied on system colors so you would expect them to work.
The modern hell era of 'every UI element is a png file' is specifically the fault of Apple who caused it (with iOS's gaudy visual style that could not be efficiently rasterized using vector graphics by the average developer) and reinforced it with the way they handled the introduction of Retina displays (adding specific tooling to support tons of massive resolution-specific pngs that developers then shipped in their apps)
System colors were very easy to tap into using VB6, Delphi, VB.Net, C#, etc. If people weren't obeying system colors they just didn't care about obeying user intent or about helping people with visual impairment.
There are examples[1][2][3] of 3rd party apps working well with the system-wide theme.
[0] https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb5/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds
Windows from 1.0 - ME, for example, would let you customize the color, font, and size of just about any thing you wanted. Starting with Luna In XP and forward, you got a few choices of themes, but you weren't really able to change all the decorations to whatever you wanted. Windows 10, for example, won't let you change the color of the text in window title bars without hacking the registry
https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-ho...
(1) Mobile caused a generation to at least temporarily sideline all interest in desktop UIs to focus on phones, causing desktop UI to reach near-abandonware status. This seems to be changing now that it's clear that the mobile phone as currently implemented is not going to replace or grow to encompass desktop's role in computing.
(2) There has been an explosion of desktop UI libraries and rendering engines with the web rendering engine (Electron and similar) being the most popular. All these different engines have their own notions of styling and color defaults and theming, causing unification of the desktop to break down. This is largely the fault of desktop OS vendors for failing to offer a unified platform or keep their platforms up to date, forcing people to seek alternatives.
The triumph of Facebook over MySpace has been attributed, repeatedly, to the customizability of MySpace, and how relatively unpleasant the result of that was. I would say the same is true of customizing Windows.
Me, I love being able to switch from Solarized to Solarized Dark to keep track of which window is which app, and I think Apple could provide slightly more customization than they do, but if the choice is between Windows 3 and no-dark-mode-just-a-tiny-accent-color, I'll take the latter every time.
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
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.
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://www.brandonsmith.ninja/
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.
"Interestingly, even though their performance was better in the light mode, participants in the study did not report any difference in their perception of text readability (e.g., their ability to focus on text) in light versus dark mode — which only reinforces the first rule of usability: don’t listen to users."
From a standpoint of readability there is not much difference for me either. Sometimes dark themes just get less love in design, because just flipping the colors usually doesn't cut it. A bright font on a dark background needs a tiny bit more wheight to look pleasing.