It's not even about preferences for me. I can spend all day in light mode without eyestrain, without issue, very comfortably.
If I encounter a page that's dark mode (GUI), after about a minute or so, I start seeing spots before my eyes that stay with me for quite a while.
To wit... I use these two firefox extensions to convert pages from Dark Mode to Light mode. If one fails, the other usually finds success (I think they work in reverse too):
side note: I cannot explain why the terminal (FG/White; BG/Black) feels incredibly comfortable to my eyes. Maybe it's the larger font I use (80 columns = ~2/3rds of my 16" screen width), the right amount of contrast, the fixed spacing...?
To be fair, both dark mode and light mode are bad. For me, optimal is with some dark grey background that mixes well with the surroundings around the screen. The point is, not to have contrast with surroundings. Kindle, or the text consoles on older CRT monitors looked good because they were not too bright against the surroundings.
And the content on the screen felt like real-world tangible object.
Having said that, I feel that dark mode (full dark) is a product of "new is exciting", "game theme", "dark means serious, mystery, suspense", "no glaring", "linux/console style, so geek", "we are coders, so different from normal people" etc
The reality is, full dark theme requires more brightness and more power consumption. It feels like searching for things in a dark room without light (mystery, suspense factor). Light theme can feel more relaxed, with lower brightness settings.
Yes. For about 15 years now I've been using a low contrast theme everywhere (Zenburn). I find "dark mode" themes annoying because of their contrast. But I do still prefer dark themes over light.
Not sure how to express this, but this concept that the color scheme of an app|website is supposed to be a "feature", bothers me to no end.
Color schemes were always supposed to be infinitely configurable by the user, not something a third party can control and dicatate. There used to be no concept of dark or light "mode", every person configured their UI colors as they wished. Want green on pink mode? No problem, just configure it.
(But to answer the question, definitely "light mode" for me. A predominantly dark screen brings on a headache quickly.)
The theory is cool, but the ending is the practical part - there are system APIs to tell you which one the user prefers, so you can just make users happy and provide both options.
I optimize for maximum amount of natural sunlight hitting my retina throughout the day, as that tends to have positive effects on my psychological wellbeing.
So I've set up my desk at a 45° angle bridging a corner of my office where I have windows along one of the walls (with me looking at the corner, of course, not into the room).
So, I'm as close to the windows as possible and have a wall of windows with natural light hitting my eyes from a 45° angle. This is important on overcast days which, where I live, is most of them because otherwise, I would get barely any natural light at all.
With dark mode, this setup runs into trouble on sunny days because sunny spots in the room tend to reflect off the screen, producing glare. This leads me to start drawing blinds and almost always spirals into me sitting in a dark room on the sunniest of days when I most want to enjoy the sun.
With light mode, I can get away with regulating the light through a movable paravent that moves with the sun and takes care of the worst of sunny spots reflecting off my screen and maybe drawing the blinds only partially.
After several lifetimes of intentionally exposing myself to black/colored text on white, I switched to dark mode last week and haven't looked back.
With such an extensive time study, highly unlikely to be usurped any time soon, and the result being quite the opposite of what I set out to prove, we can all safely put this debate to rest.
A contributing factor is my keratoconus has had some kind of remission. Which is a good thing. At one point I had so many focal points in both eyes, without corrective lenses and before surgery, more than a dozen overlapping versions of text produced unreadable spaghetti. Unless it was a very tiny font from a distance, and then the glyphs only partially occluded each other, and I could I decode them.
Looking at one of those small bright electronics power LED dots across a dark room, I could see all my focal points in each eye, and focal webs meandering between them.
So I feel quite privileged to be able to use dark mode with unaided eyes now.
The article didn’t go into this, but I suspect that a large part of the dark mode trend is due to evening/night computer use. If you don’t light your room, the screen is the only light source which is unpleasant.
But not all of us are working in the open air office... Brightly lit office after 5pm in winter (ie after sunset) doesn't mean dark mode is the best option.
Staring at a bright light makes floaters visible, so dark is a must for me. Plus, code should never be dark-on-light, that's disgusting.
Astigmatism can cause eye strain headaches. I don't know if LASIK corrects that or not, or if you have it, but getting glasses with cylindrical correction helped reduce some of my headaches. Apparently most people don't see a big starburst around lights at night, or have a faint/fuzzy halo around text at any distance.
If your monitor is so bright that a white rectangle hurts your eyes, you need to turn it down.
On my current monitor I go from 100% brightness during the day to around 20% at night. I change it roughly twice a day.
I don't understand how, even with dark mode, someone could run a modern panel full tilt at 100% through the evening. My brain can sense the intense heat of that backlight behind every pixel. I don't even want the possibility of a momentary dark mode glitch to be a concern. It took me a long time to appreciate the harm of not controlling this stuff.
For me 100% brightness is way too much when inside even during the day. Maybe the monitors I have are exceptionally bright to start with, which I doubt, but whenever I get new monitors I usually put them down to about 30-40% for usage during the day. Which is the level which to me makes it looks as if white on the screen roughly matches a white wall in a similar location in the room. This just feels the most natural and least fatiguing, probably because looking at the screen or surroundings hardly changes pupil size. Which I confirmed with a research-grade eyetracker.
The fundamental mechanism seems to be that light mode causes pupils to contract by exposing the eye to more light. This decreases spherical aberration and increases depth of field just as using as smaller aperture on a camera lens does.
Staring into a light source that contrasts enough with the ambient light to contract my pupils is uncomfortable. I don't want to do that even if it makes me read faster.
Dark mode is stupid fad that should have never been. Proper way to protect your eyes during later hours is to use entire color spectrum adjustment with appropriate applications, like f.lux, or built-in tools right in the operating system. Consuming white/bright text on black/dark background instead of the other way round is beyond any sane talk on ergonomy.
Funny enough, I use HN as a gentler flashlight when I enter my bedroom after my spouse is asleep as it’s one of the few sites/apps that doesn’t have a dark mode.
Light mode for me. Dark is just weird, IMO. I don't get more eye strain from light like so many other people do. I also don't wear sunglasses when outside, ever. Maybe I've got strong eyes.
Does anyone have an idea why we didn't see any dark mode books while dark mode turned out to be quite popular for screens?
Historically, printing black text on white paper was presumably technically easier or cheaper, but I doubt this makes much difference for modern printing of the last fifty years or so.
Edit:
Thinking about it, it's clear that dark mode is most pleasant in dark environments, because it reduces the contrast between the screen and the environment. However, books, being reflective rather than emissive, don't work in dark environments at all. Which defeats the main use case of dark mode.
Moreover, since books are reflective, there is no risk that they get brighter than the environment, while this risk exists with light mode on screens with a brightness level set too high.
light mode as the article points out for people with no vision impairment. And the trend towards dark mode in some applications as the default setting is bad.
When people talk about light mode blinding them, please do yourself a favour and do not live like a goblin. Work in a well lit room and calibrate your monitor, your eyes should not be hurting looking at bright colors.
Letting the use choose is the right answer. I’d go as far as to argue that in some sense, theming is an important accessibility feature because it allows users to adjust UI to meet needs that the developer may not have even known to exist.
It's not even about preferences for me. I can spend all day in light mode without eyestrain, without issue, very comfortably.
If I encounter a page that's dark mode (GUI), after about a minute or so, I start seeing spots before my eyes that stay with me for quite a while.
To wit... I use these two firefox extensions to convert pages from Dark Mode to Light mode. If one fails, the other usually finds success (I think they work in reverse too):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/site-color-ch...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-color/
side note: I cannot explain why the terminal (FG/White; BG/Black) feels incredibly comfortable to my eyes. Maybe it's the larger font I use (80 columns = ~2/3rds of my 16" screen width), the right amount of contrast, the fixed spacing...?
To be fair, both dark mode and light mode are bad. For me, optimal is with some dark grey background that mixes well with the surroundings around the screen. The point is, not to have contrast with surroundings. Kindle, or the text consoles on older CRT monitors looked good because they were not too bright against the surroundings.
And the content on the screen felt like real-world tangible object.
Having said that, I feel that dark mode (full dark) is a product of "new is exciting", "game theme", "dark means serious, mystery, suspense", "no glaring", "linux/console style, so geek", "we are coders, so different from normal people" etc
The reality is, full dark theme requires more brightness and more power consumption. It feels like searching for things in a dark room without light (mystery, suspense factor). Light theme can feel more relaxed, with lower brightness settings.
Yes. For about 15 years now I've been using a low contrast theme everywhere (Zenburn). I find "dark mode" themes annoying because of their contrast. But I do still prefer dark themes over light.
Not sure how to express this, but this concept that the color scheme of an app|website is supposed to be a "feature", bothers me to no end.
Color schemes were always supposed to be infinitely configurable by the user, not something a third party can control and dicatate. There used to be no concept of dark or light "mode", every person configured their UI colors as they wished. Want green on pink mode? No problem, just configure it.
(But to answer the question, definitely "light mode" for me. A predominantly dark screen brings on a headache quickly.)
The theory is cool, but the ending is the practical part - there are system APIs to tell you which one the user prefers, so you can just make users happy and provide both options.
Exactly.
I optimize for maximum amount of natural sunlight hitting my retina throughout the day, as that tends to have positive effects on my psychological wellbeing.
So I've set up my desk at a 45° angle bridging a corner of my office where I have windows along one of the walls (with me looking at the corner, of course, not into the room).
So, I'm as close to the windows as possible and have a wall of windows with natural light hitting my eyes from a 45° angle. This is important on overcast days which, where I live, is most of them because otherwise, I would get barely any natural light at all.
With dark mode, this setup runs into trouble on sunny days because sunny spots in the room tend to reflect off the screen, producing glare. This leads me to start drawing blinds and almost always spirals into me sitting in a dark room on the sunniest of days when I most want to enjoy the sun.
With light mode, I can get away with regulating the light through a movable paravent that moves with the sun and takes care of the worst of sunny spots reflecting off my screen and maybe drawing the blinds only partially.
After several lifetimes of intentionally exposing myself to black/colored text on white, I switched to dark mode last week and haven't looked back.
With such an extensive time study, highly unlikely to be usurped any time soon, and the result being quite the opposite of what I set out to prove, we can all safely put this debate to rest.
A contributing factor is my keratoconus has had some kind of remission. Which is a good thing. At one point I had so many focal points in both eyes, without corrective lenses and before surgery, more than a dozen overlapping versions of text produced unreadable spaghetti. Unless it was a very tiny font from a distance, and then the glyphs only partially occluded each other, and I could I decode them.
Looking at one of those small bright electronics power LED dots across a dark room, I could see all my focal points in each eye, and focal webs meandering between them.
So I feel quite privileged to be able to use dark mode with unaided eyes now.
Dark mode after sunset, light mode after sunrise, obviously. Just as nature intended.
The article didn’t go into this, but I suspect that a large part of the dark mode trend is due to evening/night computer use. If you don’t light your room, the screen is the only light source which is unpleasant.
But not all of us are working in the open air office... Brightly lit office after 5pm in winter (ie after sunset) doesn't mean dark mode is the best option.
Then you switch?
My entire OS, most apps and 90% of websites switch automatically with a single keyboard shortcut.
This but with a bit more flexibility depending on the state of ambient light. On a gloomy winter day at 51°N I often want dark mode all day.
I'm I the only one who gets headaches after some time with light mode?
Edit: I underwent LASIK eye surgery, and I don't recall experiencing headaches beforehand. Or maybe, just getting old?
I’ve always been quite sensitive to bright screens and get headaches from eye strain too. Dark mode has made a huge difference to me.
I’m just happy that the mode switch is well supported across OSes and browsers nowadays, though it does add some complexity to theming web apps.
Staring at a bright light makes floaters visible, so dark is a must for me. Plus, code should never be dark-on-light, that's disgusting.
Astigmatism can cause eye strain headaches. I don't know if LASIK corrects that or not, or if you have it, but getting glasses with cylindrical correction helped reduce some of my headaches. Apparently most people don't see a big starburst around lights at night, or have a faint/fuzzy halo around text at any distance.
Neither?
If your monitor is so bright that a white rectangle hurts your eyes, you need to turn it down.
On my current monitor I go from 100% brightness during the day to around 20% at night. I change it roughly twice a day.
I don't understand how, even with dark mode, someone could run a modern panel full tilt at 100% through the evening. My brain can sense the intense heat of that backlight behind every pixel. I don't even want the possibility of a momentary dark mode glitch to be a concern. It took me a long time to appreciate the harm of not controlling this stuff.
For me 100% brightness is way too much when inside even during the day. Maybe the monitors I have are exceptionally bright to start with, which I doubt, but whenever I get new monitors I usually put them down to about 30-40% for usage during the day. Which is the level which to me makes it looks as if white on the screen roughly matches a white wall in a similar location in the room. This just feels the most natural and least fatiguing, probably because looking at the screen or surroundings hardly changes pupil size. Which I confirmed with a research-grade eyetracker.
> If your monitor is so bright that a white rectangle hurts your eyes, you need to turn it down.
Can’t turn down the minimum brightness.
I use dark mode unless there is glare coming in. So on foggy or rainy days - dark mode all day. On sunny days - light mode. At night - dark mode.
The fundamental mechanism seems to be that light mode causes pupils to contract by exposing the eye to more light. This decreases spherical aberration and increases depth of field just as using as smaller aperture on a camera lens does.
Staring into a light source that contrasts enough with the ambient light to contract my pupils is uncomfortable. I don't want to do that even if it makes me read faster.
I like light mode with lower screen brightness.
I have worsening cataracts that I don’t want to get operated on yet, and dark mode is amazing. It’s so annoying when reader mode isn’t available now.
Dark mode is stupid fad that should have never been. Proper way to protect your eyes during later hours is to use entire color spectrum adjustment with appropriate applications, like f.lux, or built-in tools right in the operating system. Consuming white/bright text on black/dark background instead of the other way round is beyond any sane talk on ergonomy.
Green or amber text on black predates graphical interfaces.
Yes, and Flintmobile predates Model T. What's your point?
orange on black was it in the olden times (except on ASR-33s. q.v. https://www.eetimes.com/feast-your-eyes-on-my-asr-33-teletyp...)
Bloomberg terminals are amber on black.
Light mode forever
why doesn't HN have a dark mode feature?
Funny enough, I use HN as a gentler flashlight when I enter my bedroom after my spouse is asleep as it’s one of the few sites/apps that doesn’t have a dark mode.
And then I keep using it after in bed and then wake them up with my tapping.
There are dozens of us.
Same
If you use uBlock Origin, here's how to add automatic dark mode, based on your browser settings (modify "90%" slightly to adjust the contrast):
Just use dark reader, it works extremely well here.
I use the “HN Dark Mode” add-on set to “auto” so it switches with my OS preferences.
Both on iPhone and Mac.
Light mode for me. Dark is just weird, IMO. I don't get more eye strain from light like so many other people do. I also don't wear sunglasses when outside, ever. Maybe I've got strong eyes.
I like light mode and I'm comfortable with dark
Does anyone have an idea why we didn't see any dark mode books while dark mode turned out to be quite popular for screens?
Historically, printing black text on white paper was presumably technically easier or cheaper, but I doubt this makes much difference for modern printing of the last fifty years or so.
Edit:
Thinking about it, it's clear that dark mode is most pleasant in dark environments, because it reduces the contrast between the screen and the environment. However, books, being reflective rather than emissive, don't work in dark environments at all. Which defeats the main use case of dark mode.
Moreover, since books are reflective, there is no risk that they get brighter than the environment, while this risk exists with light mode on screens with a brightness level set too high.
Because books don't emit light straight into our eyes.
If you have never tried reading a book under direct midday sunlight, you should try it sometime. It's quite unpleasant.
Dark mode on all LED screens, with blue light filter, at low brightness.
Dark mode at high brightness and light mode at any brightness on LED screens both give me migraines.
That said, light mode on non-emissive (e-ink, actual paper) is find.
I used to be this way then I developed astigmatism. Now the bright text with black background makes it harder to see due to the lower ambient light
day → light mode ⇒ less eye strain
night → dark mode with high brightness ⇒ less eye strain
What's the science behind this?
Trust me bro.
light mode as the article points out for people with no vision impairment. And the trend towards dark mode in some applications as the default setting is bad.
When people talk about light mode blinding them, please do yourself a favour and do not live like a goblin. Work in a well lit room and calibrate your monitor, your eyes should not be hurting looking at bright colors.
led dark, eink light
Gray Mode, obviously. /s
Seriously, the best UIs let users adjust things to their preferences instead of forcing one or two-polar-opposite choices.
Letting the use choose is the right answer. I’d go as far as to argue that in some sense, theming is an important accessibility feature because it allows users to adjust UI to meet needs that the developer may not have even known to exist.
Most dark modes suck so much, as they're just "calculated" from whatever theme generator / CSS framework the legions of hell dragged them from.
Dark mode if your screen brightness is way too high. Light mode if it isn't.