System wide dark mode theme is only a recent thing. Browsers only recently added support for prefers-color-scheme to allow web pages to query system theme.
Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode
191–200 of 234 posts
Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode
#192Personally 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…
I use dark mode with large text for this reason. It's definitely true that you can read smaller text with light backgrounds, but the comfort is higher for me with less light from the screen, so I'm ok with less info on the screen and dark background.
Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode
#193Anybody else find it ironic that this revelation was made on a blog with black text on a white background?
Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode
#194Dark mode is great when you're using a screen casually close to bedtime and don't want a painful bright light. It's also great when you're doing image or video editing and need to be able to see full contrast in the dark areas, without being overwhemlmed by bright light surrounding. But it's objectively far worse if you're reading significant amounts of text, for the simple optical reason that light bleeds inside of…
Objectively, your vision is a subjective thing. The default is dark on light. After trying the opposite some people decide they like it better. Are they wrong? Maybe they feel better, and the demand for configuration over color and hue in UI is a normal response.
Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Came here to say a variation of this. Dark mode is "cool" right now because it's still a relatively new thing. In five years when everything is dark mode by default this same poll would yield a totally different, maybe even inverse, result.
Maybe people who spend most of their working lives alone, staring at screens, are picking dark mode because it's comfortable, not cool. There is no one around to impress. It's ok if you don't get it, but that doesn't mean it's just a fad. It's cool to be comfortable, and now easier. OLED screens invert the default behavior of a screen from light to dark. It'd be absurd to fight the comfort that this can provide.
I WFH and can have pretty much any setup I want, and I prefer dark on light background. Certain colors are harder for the eye to see (blue is a big offender) and yet, we have UI designers putting blue on a black background. So, I use a lighter color background, dark-ish font color and I have a 15% brown tint on my glasses. Ahhh.. comfort.
So, I agree, it's cool to be comfortable.
Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. I tried to find more data but it's scarce. I would love to get more data for more apps as I think it's definitely biased around people who spend a LOT of time staring at text. I'm a programmer so spend a ton of time in my IDE. Polar is designed for people that read a LOT so dark mode really matters to them. When you're reading 100s of PDFs having a dark mode is kind of important! In retrospect I'm kicking mys…
Most of the data that I've found suggests that dark text on a light background is measurably more legible than the reverse. This effect is increased for people with astigmatism -- which is about half the population, so that's not insignificant. There's a lot of pushback I've seen when studies like that get cited: they're old, they weren't about programmers, etc. And, maybe, but even though we're staring at LCD panels…
I imagine you don't know the answer, but I'm curious as to if these studies were controlled for screen glare.
Dark themes/backgrounds have far worse issues with screen glare from badly configured room lighting than light ones do in my experience.
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I'm also curious why another area of design that is extremely concerned with legibility seems to have reached the opposite conclusion, pretty much worldwide.
Road signs.
Even though signs themselves can vary widely, the standard color scheme for road signs in every developed country I can think of, is a darker background with lighter text. I certainly don't have the studies in front of me, but I know a great deal of research has gone into fonts and legibility for road signs, and I presume what we see on the roads in the world is the result.
Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Came here to say a variation of this. Dark mode is "cool" right now because it's still a relatively new thing. In five years when everything is dark mode by default this same poll would yield a totally different, maybe even inverse, result.
Maybe people who spend most of their working lives alone, staring at screens, are picking dark mode because it's comfortable, not cool. There is no one around to impress. It's ok if you don't get it, but that doesn't mean it's just a fad. It's cool to be comfortable, and now easier. OLED screens invert the default behavior of a screen from light to dark. It'd be absurd to fight the comfort that this can provide.
CRTs were default black, yet we went from dark to light backgrounds during their heyday.
Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode
#198Instant 'dark mode' bookmarklet / scriptlet:
javascript:(function(){body=document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];body.style.backgroundColor='black';body.style.filter='invert(100%)';})();
If only I could work out how to stop it from inverting the images too....
Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode
#199The 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?
I think this article sums up pretty nicely the reasons. Go to the chapter 'Do dark themes help your eyes?': https://www.maketecheasier.com/are-dark-themes-better-for-ey...
Re: Dark Mode by Default – 95% of People Prefer Dark over Light Mode
#200Earlier 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.
For some people with astigmatism this is a worst case scenario. As you try and read a light font on a dark background in a dark room, the pupil opens up, letting more light in, however opening up the pupil this way exacerbates the effect of the deformed cornea.