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Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode

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Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode

#161

Post by sprayk »

kleer001 wrote: post #21

Personally I can't stand dark mode. It literally hurts my eyes. Strain after a few moments and interlacing ghost lines that linger in my vision for a minute. Does anyone else have this? Is it brain cancer?! edit: Thanks, I'm pretty sure it's not cancer. Question: But why me? Age? Staring too long at monitors? Drugs? It doesn't seem to effect too many others.

Dark mode can cause strain on eyes. Lower total brightness means your pupils open up to be able to take in more light. Wider pupils means lower depth of field, i.e. less stuff in focus immediately in front of/behind whatever you are currently focused on. You are more susceptible to having to refocus from subtle movements with a lower depth of field. The less of a steady state your focus, the more the muscles involved in focusing are engaged, which might be a cause of the strain you are feeling.

Similarly, this is why your eyes can hurt while reading in dimmer settings. It's not because low light itself is somehow harmful while reading, but because your eyes have a harder time staying focused as you naturally move while reading.

edit: I adopted light themes everywhere after reading this, probably https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/53268 . Knowing depth of field from photography helped this make sense, as well as understanding (from conversations with a doctor in my family) that the generic feeling "strain" is most likely associated with muscle activity than anything else.

Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode

#162

Post by kps »

tlb wrote: post #7
api wrote: post #2

I think the rise of dark mode is mostly related to really good displays. Dark mode looks like shit on CRTs and even older flat panels with poor contrast.

I used to dislike dark backgrounds, but now I have several apps set to dark mode. But going way back to the 80s, terminals were mostly dark mode. CRTs mostly looked terrible with bright backgrounds until the Mac. I don't know if my own change in preference is due to underlying change in screen technology, or something else. Screen time might affect it too -- maybe people prefer light mode when they're only on-screen…

If you had a low-resolution display with visible scan lines, as most text terminals did, then you had a stripy light background, which was pretty bad. But a high-resolution gapless display on a reasonably adjusted CRT was great.

Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode

#163

Post by sprayk »

zeroxx1986 wrote: post #48

The problem is, that many of the developers are mistaking the Dark mode with BLACK mode (like Opera GX, Telegram's night mode, Android's [MIUI's] dark theme, and similar themed applications). Dark mode - as with Discord - is really about having the contrast _reduced_ and overall making the whole experience more dark greyish, which reduces strain on the eyes. Try this with BLACK instead, and you'll start to cry after…

how does lower contrast reduce strain on eyes?

Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode

#164

Post by unglaublich »

After trying both light and dark themed interfaces for a few years, I concluded that for me there's only one setup that works: light theme with low brightness (monitor setting) and 'flux'/'night light'. That way, my monitor looks just like everything else in my office, like reading a newspaper. That's one of the many ergonomic improvements that help me stay alive.

Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode

#165

Post by cj »

RobLach wrote: post #152
ARandomerDude wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. I work remotely so nobody ever sees my screen except for me. I prefer dark mode because it's more comfortable on my eyes.

Dark mode objectively is more straining on the eyes though, so it must be more of a psychological preference.

> Dark mode objectively is more straining on the eyes

Can you substantiate this?

Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode

#166

Post by vecplane »

Dark mode is my favorite and I appreciate more apps and websites adding support. Recently I've seen Slack and Perforce finally get official dark themes.

For websites that don't have good dark themes or user styles, you can use the Dark Reader browser extension to toggle it on any website - https://darkreader.org/

Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode

#167

Post by z92 »

robotron wrote: post #46
dpcan wrote: post #26

I don't know many people my age who can still handle dark mode. It was easy for me many years ago. I looked at command lines all day and no problem. Now I see blurry lines for 10 minutes all around me if I have to spend any length of time in a command line interface, or look at an article in dark mode. This is, unfortunately, an accessibility issue, not a design issue.

I'm older, my eyes are getting pretty bad, and I have to have dark mode. This is why data on this is important.

Second this. Aged. Dark mode and command prompt is less tiresome on eye than white.

Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode

#168

Post by rsynnott »

mjw1007 wrote: post #154
iforgotpassword wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree on the trend thing. Even older research supports the claim that black on white is easier on the eyes, this is why we switched away from white on black (DOS and UNIX). This applies to screens in well lit environments though, which would explain the rise of the dark mode in recent years: Smartphones in bed. But there it's more about the "less bad" solution. The key part is having a well lit environment, so that t…

I think the switch to black-on-white when GUIs first appeared was largely because the prototypical application was a word processor, where the selling point was that what you saw on the screen looked like what you were going to print on paper. Other applications, like spreadsheets, ended up with a lot of the the same printer-oriented design. It showed up in things like font sizes in points (which are nominally length…

I suspect it's more about high refresh rate CRTs. On low refresh rate, blocks of colour really were very unpleasant to look at, but this went away over about 70hz. Of course, this was never an issue on LCDs.

There was also an intermediate period where backgrounds were usually _blue_.

Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode

#169

Post by rsynnott »

anewguy9000 wrote: post #111
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've noticed that most techies do prefer dark mode, and I also recall reading that techies are disproportionately night owls - I wonder if there's a correlation there. If I may be mildly unflattering for a moment, I think it's just a trendiness thing. Dark Mode looks more like a terminal and signals "I'm a real big-boy hackerman" or something. If someone has real data showing it actually causes less eyestrain or so…

bro you dont need "real data" to convince yourself that water is wet. if you have eyes you can get "empirical data": go into dark room. read black text on white background. observe how you are squinting and its hard to read. enable dark mode. (you can use something like night mode for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/night-light-m... if you arent sure how). profit.

> go into dark room.

If you have a computer, you probably have electric lighting. Just use that.

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