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Comment by Scarbutt | Hacker News Reader

Is dark mode a fashion thing or does it really helps with eye strain? In darker surroundings, I just lower the brightness.

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1. Lowering brightness is basically lowering contrast; some people can’t read black-on-grey so well. A lot easier to read (bright-)white-on-black, while still not getting so much light exposure. (Have you tried reading a book on your phone in bed at night?)

2. The rise of dark-mode popularity seems to coincide with the availability of OLED screens, where black is a very, very dark color (i.e. what your screen looks like when it’s off) compared to what it is on LCD screens (where it’s just “what the backlight looks like when the LCD is trying its best to block it.”) In these cases, not only is #FFF-on-#000 is seemingly higher contrast than #000-on-#FFF, but also uses far less battery besides.

> The rise of dark-mode popularity seems to coincide with the availability of OLED screens

"Dark mode" predates OLEDs by decades. Pretty much up until the first Macs, turning on a computer and getting something other than green, amber, or white text on a black background was an exception. Even then, code editors and terminal emulators on Macs and eventually Windows systems typically allowed for a dark mode, if only as a secondary option, well before anything other than CRT displays were practical.

Of course dark modes and dark themes have been around for a long time, but the user you are responding to specifically pointed to the 'rise of dark' mode, meaning the recent explosion in popularity

Most of the commentary I've seen about dark mode is how less readable it is, for whatever reason.

Anecdotally, dark mode on slack appears more difficult to read than light mode, at least in a well lit room. I couldn't use it for very long.

I think it's a fashion thing with a thin veneer of eye strain reduction (since, AFAIK, there's little conclusive evidence dark mode matters here)

I have HN and a terminal open side by side, and I can tell you HN is more painful to look at, simply because it's like shining flashlight into the eyes compared to a black-background terminal.

You should try using dark mode extensions like DarkReader if you aren't already. I have it enabled on most sites and it works almost flawlessly.

[0]https://darkreader.org/

I want to try it badly but it goes against most fibers of my being to give a 3rd party extension such crazy permissions:

  Access your data for all websites
  Access browser tabs

How else would it rewrite the styles for every page?

Dark Background on Light Text extension is great and you can customize the colors.

Also, try Stylus with the "Hacker News Readable Dark" style.

Not for me, nobody looking at my computer except for me and I have Slack now in dark mode, I have Dark Background and Light Text in Firefox (also dark mode) and custom dark style sheets in Stylus where they are available and good.

Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but staring at a blinding white computer monitor inches from my face all day as a software engineer HURTS. Like, literally hurts after a while.

Dark mode is much easier on the eyes.

Dark mode also saves on battery life (quite significantly). That's one of the biggest reasons why Apple is rolling dark mode out on the iPhone.

Pretty sure that's not true for normal LCD where the screen is backlit. OLED is a bit different so it certainly helps there.

Dark mode doesn’t really have that much of an impact for most use, and I’m fairly sure Apple was more likely to have added to to iOS because they had just done so with macOS.

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