Please don't force dark mode
198 comments
·January 19, 20251000100_1000101
crazygringo
No, dark mode is not traditional normal.
Paper was, which is black on white.
And you shouldn't have your device or monitor set to glowing white -- turn the brightness down so it's the same as a sheet of paper next to it.
And Windows didn't change the paradigm, the Mac was the first widely available consumer device which did. And its built-in CRT wasn't especially glowing either -- it was less bright than paper in traditional office lighting.
Early computers had "dark" color schemes because the resolution was so low and pixels "bled" brightness, that it was easier to read. As technology improved, that problem thankfully went away, and it's easier on the eyes to read dark text on a light background, regardless of print or screen.
scarab92
I don’t particularly care what is traditional.
There’s a significant base of users that prefer light mode and dark mode so provide both, it’s generally not difficult to do so.
I disagree that apps should tone down light mode. It’s better that all apps use the same brightness and contrast and then users can adjust their monitor to suit their individual preference.
Ferret7446
Paper, particularly bleached paper, is not "traditional normal" either.
I'm no paleontologist, but originally humans would use substances like ash and fruit to draw/write on rock/leaves/bark, so white/red/colors on grey/green/brown.
null
Sunspark
It's also really not necessary to use #FFFFFF as white.
Paper itself is not that shade.
recursive
It's not really meaningful without defining lighting and color space. Have you ever seen ink on white paper that was lighter than the paper?
in-pursuit
Given that screens are always adding their own light, it’s impossible for a screen to ever be equally bright as a piece of paper next to it. The screen will always be brighter.
scarab92
That depends entirely on ambient light levels.
All screens are brighter than white paper under moon light, almost none are brighter than white paper under midday sun.
tshaddox
Do what now? An entirely black OLED screen is certainly going to reflect less of the room’s light than a sheet of white paper. An OLED screen displaying white at 10% of its maximum brightness is also likely going to be less bright than a sheet of white paper in most rooms.
hollerith
No because some surfaces reflect more of the light than other sufaces.
flockonus
Traditional normal is not an absolute statement. Sure DOS / Unix back in the early days of PC displayed black backgrounds due the display's at the time working better this way.
Before that, people shared information in white paper; and the beginning of the internet brought it back with black text over white background.
Therefore there is no canonical traditional normal, it all depends when one joined.
1000100_1000101
Paper and paper-like writing surfaces were non-white for a long time before we got bleached white paper.
We haven't yet had a glowing-white paper.
Traditional-normal for computing was a dark background.
There was likely a technological limit in the use of pure white at the start when "emulating" paper. VGA 16-color mode likely meant that the choice was between bright white and medium grey, which was too dark. Configurability has lagged behind though.
markhahn
no, if you think trad-norm is dark mode, it just identifies when you started using computers.
qwerty456127
DOS notably used eye-friendly grey text, not bright white.
hobobaggins
The contrast ratio of an old CRT (and amber and green were considered more comfortable than white-on-black) is radically different from a modern LCD/IPS/OLED screen. It's so different that there's no comparison. Dark mode might be ok for more people if there is some brightness to the background instead of being completely black, but then you lose most of the benefits of OLED.
leeman2016
Yes
The "true black" OLED displays have their part of the display off where there are black pixels, if I am not wrong. So, wouldn't dark mode suit well for those types of displays?
TylerE
OLEDs are per-pixel backlighting, so they can go full black on a single pixel.
mrob
Dark mode was normal in the early days of CRTs, when most CRTs refreshed at 60Hz or lower. The dark background made the flicker less obvious. Once higher refresh rate CRTs became common (1990s), the flicker became less of a problem and light mode became the default.
markhahn
windows originated very little: plenty of type-on-page metaphor predated it.
original was light mode: printer terminals. yes, green-on-black became normal in the mid seventies, and some amber-on-black. but even early lisp machines, the Alto, Smalltalk, W/X/Andrew interfaces, Next, etc - type-on-page, not serial-terminal-ish dark mode.
amelius
Wasn't it the original Mac that changed it?
pdw
And Mac copied it from Xerox. But it was indeed the introduction of GUIs and WYSIWYG "what you see is what you get": the screen had to mimic paper.
tempest_
It didn't have to though.
Lotus 1-2-3 mimicked a spreadsheet and it is not searing white.
petepete
Xerox had applications with white backgrounds from the start.
1000100_1000101
Mac likely did use this scheme, and yes, copied it from Xerox. However neither Macs nor Xerox had mainstream use. I'd only actually seen 3 Macs in the wild before their switch to Intel, over 20 years later.
Windows adopting the "paper"-white background and whole world drooling over the arrival of Windows 3.1 and 95 is when it became the standard, I think.
jameshart
There's no 'likely' about it - the Mac absolutely used white as its background color for document windows and finder folders. It was striking and different when you first encountered one of the early compact Macs to see how white the screen was when you opened MacWrite.
As for the claim that Macs had no 'mainstream use' for 20 years until the Intel switch... your personal Mac-free life is a sad story, but not remotely universal, and while it's certainly true that Macs always had minority market share, it's insane to suggest they weren't influential.
tom_
Windows 2 was predominantly dark text on white background. Same with GEM on the Atari ST. Both current in the late 1980s.
Sinclair's ZX Spectrum was black text on white background in 1982.
morning-coffee
Yeah, it wasn't Windows that changed it, they just hopped on the bandwagon. I remember (SunOS)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS] on a SPARC in 1987 that was black in white text, and Macintosh before that.
arp242
> It was Microsoft Windows that changed the paradigm to default to a searing white display with black text in most apps
My early 90s Sun SPARCStation was black on white, right from the boot. The xterm default is black on white too, a default that far predates Windows AFAIK.
I don't really know the full history on all of this, but in my limited knowledge, this seems grossly simplified at best since there seem to have been several popular systems before Windows that used white background colours.
[1]: Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f72A9AHigeQ
ssivark
Traditionally we were using CRT monitors and 80x24 terminals... it feels silly to hold on to that out of inertia.
jemmyw
Well hang on a sec. If a website is dark with light text and has just that one style, then that's it's theme, it's vibe. Dark mode only exists if there is a light mode, and give versa.
Don't force having to maintain two modes on websites who don't want to?
charles_f
That's exactly what the article says, right at the beginning
> If dark mode is a characteristic of your brand, please ensure you choose a comfortable contrast ratio for the text.
gabeio
I think the poster was talking about phrasing, “dark mode” implies there are modes to switch. The article seems to incorrectly be conflating dark mode vs dark themes. Dark themes tend to be unadjustable.
IMHO I usually just flip to the reader mode on my phone browser or desktop browser when I don’t like the theme of a website. This obviously doesn’t work for all websites but it’s a nice work around since most reader modes allow you to adjust coloring yourself.
benatkin
They actually are saying that nobody should have dark mode sites, except watered down ones.
What are these "dark-mode" (misnomer) sites that don't have a comfortable contrast ratio? I know there are some, but I think they're including a broad swath of primarily light-on-dark sites in this group.
Adjust the brightness on your screen.
X's is pretty good, the background is #000000 and there is some #ffffff content, the text is a bit farther from #ffffff than I'd like but pretty close. https://colorpalettecombos.netlify.app/
oooyay
Curiously, the contrast ratio wasn't a good signal for me. The white on black text didn't strain my eyes but this did:
> However, light gray text on a dark gray background is easy on my eyes. Here the background is #666 and the text is #E0E0E0 which creates a contrast ratio of 4.34:1.
mmis1000
Github used to do this. The result is their dark mode isn't useful for anyone. However, They revamped their color scheme later and made it comfortable to read.
null
Brajeshwar
Too many web developers assume everyone loves Dark Mode, default to that, and defend their choice by pointing to the toggle button that says Dark/Light Mode. I’m surprised many, even with freshly done websites, still do not pick up on the user’s preferences and are set to it!
For developers, the `color-scheme` CSS property allows an element to indicate which color schemes it can comfortably be rendered in.[1]
:root {
color-scheme: light dark;
}
element { light-dark(light-color-code, dark-color-code);
System Preferences, then set the theme to LIGHT, then run
defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool Yes
Reset back to the default theme.
defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool No
smlavine
I agree with this. Default, unconfigurable light mode has been around for a while, and infrastructure like the Dark Reader plugin is around to address this. There is no such thing for light mode, though.
In my opinion, light mode is better than dark mode in most situations. The only situation dark mode is better than light mode is when you're sitting in a dark room with your screen as your only light source, and most of the time that's not really a healthy situation to be in. Dark mode is a crutch. Turn on a light or go to sleep.
Light mode might be annoying to read in no-light environments, but dark mode is nigh impossible to read in high-light environments. Ever try to read a dark mode UI on your phone on a bright summer's day? Can't read a thing, even with brightness cranked all the way up.
bee_rider
On my system, the dark reader plugin also has an option to force a light theme.
Actually, the browser has the ability to set a default background and foreground anyway, so this extension would be unnecessary if websites would behave properly and respect these defaults unless they really need to. We live in an unfortunate world where a “actually respect my preferences” extension is necessary, but since it is necessary, it should be noted that it covers both options. Overall the situation is pretty stupid but hey at least we’ve got workarounds, right?
aniviacat
Browsers shouldn't set a preferred colour scheme by default.
I think the prefers-color-scheme media query would be respected on more sites if by default it had the value "unset" or something, instead of defaulting to "light" or "dark".
I personally don't respect it on my sites for this reason. 99% of people visiting my sites won't actually have set this value themselves.
steve_taylor
> 99% of people visiting my sites won't actually have set this value themselves.
It's inherited from their operating system settings. Dark theme is typically opt-in.
Kamq
> Browsers shouldn't set a preferred colour scheme by default.
I mean, they really don't (the defaults are exactly what they have been since Mosaic left the scene). Unless the user tells them to do something else.
And at that point, it's my computer, and I told it to do something, why shouldn't it do that?
BugsJustFindMe
> The only situation dark mode is better than light mode is when you're sitting in a dark room with your screen as your only light source, and most of the time that's not really a healthy situation to be in. Dark mode is a crutch. Turn on a light or go to sleep.
It's always been strange to me how many people without a medical reason for doing so want to sit in dark rooms like cave trolls, but there we are.
At least now operating systems all have switchable modes that get reported to the browser. The browser can/should adapt to whatever setting the OS reports.
But UI design is, with a few islands of rationality in history from people like Paul Fitts, mostly a cascade of poorly applied vibes and fads. First people say that contrast is bad, so then people don't use enough contrast. Then people say that brightness is bad, so people don't use enough brightness. Then people realize why contrast and brightness were important all along and the circle of life continues.
cosmic_cheese
> It's always been strange to me how many people without a medical reason for doing so want to sit in dark rooms like cave trolls, but there we are.
As a millennial, I grew up with rooms being lit by 1-3 relatively dim lampshaded 40-60w incandescent bulbs at night. As a result that’s what feels comfortable and relaxing to me as an adult. Rooms at home being brightly lit at night feels grating and reminiscent of a grocery store or hospital or something.
carlosjobim
> It's always been strange to me how many people without a medical reason for doing so want to sit in dark rooms like cave trolls, but there we are.
Because screens are not bright enough to use outside or in well-lit environments.
If E-ink or similar technology manages to get a bit better refresh rates, it's going to change building architecture in the entire industrialized world.
BugsJustFindMe
I'll grant you outside, because the power of the sun is immense, but they're definitely bright enough to use in any well-lit indoor environment. Do you mean if the lights are behind your head instead of overhead? That's either bad lighting or bad ergonomics, and I'm sorry if you must suffer through that. That sucks.
An ergonomic screen arrangement, with the display placed such that you're not looking downward at it, should make it basically impossible for an overhead indoor light to interfere with your view.
> If E-ink or similar technology manages to get a bit better refresh rates, it's going to change building architecture in the entire industrialized world.
Fingers crossed. I remember yearning for the breakout of transflective displays that never happened.
tunared
As someone that had cataracts, light mode was very hard to read. It was like looking directly into high beams. I used a dark reader plugins that was alright, but was not the same as a site designed to support dark mode.
kps
Yes, and for someone with astigmatic halation, dark mode is very hard to read. Web sites should support both, and respect `:prefers-color-scheme`.
jorams
> The only situation dark mode is better than light mode is when you're sitting in a dark room with your screen as your only light source
It's really not that extreme. Dark mode is more comfortable as soon as it's dark outside (this time of year that starts between 3 and 4 pm) unless I'm flooding my entire room with enough light to replace the sunlight. I still have the lights on, but none of that light is as bright/white as an average white webpage. Even with screen brightness turned down and a blue light filter, an all-white webpage is usually just too much white.
> Light mode might be annoying to read in no-light environments, but dark mode is nigh impossible to read in high-light environments.
This is just completely opposite for me. Reading in dark mode is only uncomfortable if there's sunlight basically directly behind the screen, while light mode is only really comfortable in high-light environments.
tbrownaw
> * only situation dark mode is better than light mode is when you're sitting in a dark room with your screen as your only light source,*
Also maybe if you set your screen brightness inappropriately high.
lukan
Or if you are sensitive to light.
I feel kind of traumatized for years of forced light mode everywhere. It hurts my eyes.
In bright sun when outside, I use light mode. Allmost everywhere else, I won't. So please @everyone thinking like this, don't assume, what is best for me, because your taste is different.
Zak
A difficulty is that the appropriate screen brightness varies with the content it's displaying. Going from a low-contrast dark site to a white background is especially jarring.
jezek2
With a properly set monitor and gamma setting there is no issue with switching between light and dark mode at all (even in a pitch black room at night). I use it regularly, I prefer light mode but I also use dark mode for stuff like terminals. So I switch a lot between these.
I have written another post about how to set the monitor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42762770
jltsiren
Or from text and diagrams (which often contain large single-color areas) to photos and videos. The default HN color scheme looks much brighter than the bright daylight photo I currently have as a desktop background.
jezek2
Yeah, most people use their screens with brightness cranked up and then wonder why they have all sort of problems.
The trick is to set a low brightness, in my case it's a little below what you would call comfortable, but that's because you adapt to it in a sec and will be perceived as good.
If you can't set it too low on the monitor, set brightness to 0 and lower the contrast. If it's still too bright use also brightness/contrast controls in your GPU settings. It is also needed to adjust the settings during the day. But having a more controlled light in your room is a better option.
Once you start getting comments from others that they can't see shit on your screen then you've set the correct level :)
Another very often forgotten thing is to set up correct gamma correction! Yes that thing from CRTs is often needed on LCDs too! LCDs can produce quite big contrast which is unpleasant, for example I set mine to 1.3, fixed it nicely for me.
One approach to find a good value is to have antialiased text both in white-on-black and black-on-white and switching between these. Once the apparent thickness is the same then you've got the right value. Beware of ClearType settings though, you may need to do the test with a classic antialiasing instead.
The result is that you can comfortably use light mode in total dark room without any issues.
LtWorf
I don't really want to spend 5 minutes every time to open the 25 menus my screen uses to change the brightness.
cwbriscoe
I never knew about the Dark Reader plugin. I just installed it and it makes HN, Slashdot and other sites much more readable for me. Thanks!
hiAndrewQuinn
I like Pure Black mode because the black pixels actually turn off on my screens, making it much more pleasant to look at. Even in broad daylight! I wish Pure Black mode was an option separate from Dark and Light mode, like it is on some Android apps. For now I get by by minimizing brightness in Dark Reader, but it is a bit clunky.
bhauer
> Light mode might be annoying to read in no-light environments, but dark mode is nigh impossible to read in high-light environments.
Backlit screens are difficult to read in high-light environments regardless of whether you're reading black text on white or white text on black. I use white-on-black ("dark mode") on my e-ink Kindle to read outside all the time. And the same is true on our Daylight computer. White-on-black remains my preference in high-light environments.
nfw2
This particular blog doesn't heed device settings and, as such, forces light mode on its readers.
The author also changes their mind halfway through and decides the problem is actually color contrast, not dark mode.
gregmac
The author's blog also explicitly defines
color: #111;
background-color: #fdfdfd;
Springtime
Yeah their actual point is about contrast ratio, which makes the headline a bit disingenuous.
Ironically they end by saying they'll use an invert filter as a workaround, while for those who prefer dark mode if doing the same on the author's own stark white bg/black text site (such as Vivaldi's 'Invert Mode') will produce the very contrast ratio in dark they're complaining about :p
josephg
Yeah - and an invert filter messes up photos. Again, like the author has on their blog.
If you wanna argue that we shouldn't force dark mode, maybe don't go around forcing light mode. My eyes hurt.
lewiscollard
Then un-mess them up :)
html {
filter: invert(1);
}
img {
filter: invert(1);
}
javascript:(function(){var s=document.createElement("style");s.innerText="html{filter: invert(1);}img{filter: invert(1);}";document.head.append(s)})()
kiririn
Please don't force low contrast ratios on users. Not everyone is calibrated to >100 nits and viewing your content in a bright but sensible ambient environment
The recommended grey-on-grey may be unreadably low in contrast when viewed on, for example, 0 brightness in a pitch black room, or in direct sunlight
The full SDR colour range is there to be used, this isn't HDR where you need to limit things to not blind your users
deadmutex
+1, grey-on-grey can be hard for older folks too
ryandrake
Not just light vs. dark. I wish web sites would respect my system's preferences in general. If my OS theme is purple Comic Sans text on top of a yellow brick wall background, then my browser should respect that. I want to read text using the full width of the browser rather than a tiny 5 inch column down the middle of it, I shouldn't have to perform wizardry in the browser settings, conjure up some overriding CSS, or install extensions to do this. The browser should just say "tough shit, web developer, the user's preference wins."
Browsers have handed over way too much control to developers to ignore what the user wants. So much for being a "user agent." Browsers are more like the developer's agent.
lxgr
Sounds like you want to use reader mode by default? Some browsers allow that.
worble
Well, there's not much you can do about yellow background, but forcing Comic Sans is as easy as setting it as your preferred font and then deselecting "Allow pages to choose their own fonts", at least in the Firefox settings page.
This is what I do and it makes browsing the web so much better.
robertclaus
Do desktop apps or anything else really respect this?
Borealid
Desktop apps using a UI toolkit like qt, gtk, wpf, etc do by default.
The developer needs to do additional work to un-standardize their application.
ryandrake
Yes, and too many applications go out of their way to ignore user preferences on desktop, too! It's a major problem IMO. The user should be in charge of their computer.
nottorp
Funny because i find the blog's example of "readable text" extremely hard to read. Because of the low contrast.
What kind of eye condition or monitor does he have?
jrockway
Dark Reader turns dark mode sites light, if you want.
You can control the contrast ratio on dark mode websites with the "brightness" control on your monitor. It changes the emissivity of the pixels. Turning it down keeps black the same color and makes whites blacker. Monitors typically ship with the white level way too high for any real work (it looks good in the computer store though), and so you should probably always be turning this down.
londons_explore
There is a web API to figure out if the user is in dark mode. use it.
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
CSS Rules here...
}recursivedoubts
Dark mode was a mistake. Early LCDs were dim so everyone cranked up the whites to make up for it. Now LCDs have caught up and it burns a significant number of peoples eyes, so we increasingly have to support two modes. Apples comically ugly dark mode icons shows how hard this is to do well.
I think the ideal thing to do would be to move back to greys as the base color for computer interfaces, like we had when bright CRTs were the norm. This has the added advantage of allowing depth affordances in UI elements, which we should also bring back.
enlyth
That's just like.. your opinion man. The whole point is it should be configurable so users can set their preference.
Personally I am blinded by light mode and it hurts and strains my eyes, everyone is different.
layer8
CRTs also had easily adjustable brightness and contrast dials, so everyone could always quickly adjust to their preferred setting for black on white or vice versa.
eikenberry
Isn't "greys as the base color" what dark mode is for the most part? Light mode is generally off-white and dark mode is grey scaled.
recursivedoubts
No. You can't do drop shadows in most dark-mode setups, there isn't enough contrast to make it work.
OS9:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Windows NT:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
BEOS:
masswerk
Regarding the BeOS screenshot: mind that this is not regular BeOS, but the OS X-like "Baqua" appearance of the eOS 5.1d0 developer release, which never saw a regular release.
(I'm taking no offence, but it may be important to point out what's what, now that image references are becoming as inevitably as increasingly unreliable, as for "AI".)
SOTGO
I'm glad this article included an example of what happens to their eyes when they read text in dark mode. I get the same afterimages and it's incredibly disorienting when it happens and dark mode makes it way worse than normal. As an aside, does anyone know if that effect has a name?
oliviergg
Yes, I am glad to see this post, because I had the sentiment to be alone with this ‘symptom’. Can’t bear dark mode, it give me disorientation and nausea. I wasn’t able to explain this to my ophthalmologist.
snovymgodym
You might have this. (I do as well).
Dark mode was the traditional normal.
From early green or amber text on black mono displays. Grey on black DOS text mode. Light Blue on Dark Blue C-64. Apple 2's grey/white (I don't recall) on black. Even GUI wise, Amiga used a dark-blue background as the default Workbench, with user selectable palettes for everything.
It was Microsoft Windows that changed the paradigm to default to a searing white display with black text in most apps, like Notepad, Word, etc., because "it's more like paper". Sure, paper is white, but it's not glowing white. That transition was painful.
I'm glad to see dark-modes return, I agree there needs to be an option, not just forced dark-mode. Preferably light mode options to use a not-as-bright-as-possible white too.