Dark Mode vs. Light Mode
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All of that said: we added dark mode to our app at work and my manager (who's older) commented offhand that he could read things much better in light mode. That was the first inkling I'd ever gotten that it was actually more effective for anybody. I'd thought it was just an aesthetic preference.
Anyway, it's as easy as it's ever been to support both, which I did when I recently rebuilt my personal website:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
It definitely helps when trying to see a 6" screen on a motorbike at night in rain not to blinded by what's effectively a torch in your sightline.
"Interestingly, even though their performance was better in the light mode, participants in the study did not report any difference in their perception of text readability (e.g., their ability to focus on text) in light versus dark mode — which only reinforces the first rule of usability: don’t listen to users."
From a standpoint of readability there is not much difference for me either. Sometimes dark themes just get less love in design, because just flipping the colors usually doesn't cut it. A bright font on a dark background needs a tiny bit more wheight to look pleasing.
WindowBlinds[0] on Windows XP was extremely customizable. I remember the top community themes were usually dark and minimalist ones.
I certainly don't. Do you have a specific OS in mind?
In my experience it worked as long as you only used applications that used the stock UI toolkit without customization. As soon as some app tries to use custom controls (or even just custom icons) it becomes messy, either because these controls won't apply the custom system theme and they'll stand out like a sore thumb or because they'll apply partially and make the control hard or impossible to see correctly.
On Linux it's even worse because of the multiple UI toolkits/desktop environment available (GTK-gnome/Qt-kde/motif/wxwidgets/...) which often need to be configured independently from one another. And on top of that some applications like gvim, emacs, firefox or terminal emulators will have their own custom theme configuration that will override the global theme.
I definitely understand why Apple thought it was a good idea to lock things up to give the user a consistent experience.
The Windows "high contrast" accessibility mode relied on system colors so you would expect them to work.
The modern hell era of 'every UI element is a png file' is specifically the fault of Apple who caused it (with iOS's gaudy visual style that could not be efficiently rasterized using vector graphics by the average developer) and reinforced it with the way they handled the introduction of Retina displays (adding specific tooling to support tons of massive resolution-specific pngs that developers then shipped in their apps)
System colors were very easy to tap into using VB6, Delphi, VB.Net, C#, etc. If people weren't obeying system colors they just didn't care about obeying user intent or about helping people with visual impairment.
There are examples[1][2][3] of 3rd party apps working well with the system-wide theme.
Windows from 1.0 - ME, for example, would let you customize the color, font, and size of just about any thing you wanted. Starting with Luna In XP and forward, you got a few choices of themes, but you weren't really able to change all the decorations to whatever you wanted. Windows 10, for example, won't let you change the color of the text in window title bars without hacking the registry
https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-ho...
(1) Mobile caused a generation to at least temporarily sideline all interest in desktop UIs to focus on phones, causing desktop UI to reach near-abandonware status. This seems to be changing now that it's clear that the mobile phone as currently implemented is not going to replace or grow to encompass desktop's role in computing.
(2) There has been an explosion of desktop UI libraries and rendering engines with the web rendering engine (Electron and similar) being the most popular. All these different engines have their own notions of styling and color defaults and theming, causing unification of the desktop to break down. This is largely the fault of desktop OS vendors for failing to offer a unified platform or keep their platforms up to date, forcing people to seek alternatives.
The triumph of Facebook over MySpace has been attributed, repeatedly, to the customizability of MySpace, and how relatively unpleasant the result of that was. I would say the same is true of customizing Windows.
Me, I love being able to switch from Solarized to Solarized Dark to keep track of which window is which app, and I think Apple could provide slightly more customization than they do, but if the choice is between Windows 3 and no-dark-mode-just-a-tiny-accent-color, I'll take the latter every time.
I use Materialistic on mobile, and it has a dark theme. On web, I just use a dark theme extension for sites in general.
chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark
Cascadea CSS Script: https://gist.github.com/1player/af5f02ccbe7c930f793fc104c999...
Not perfect, tested on Safari, gets the job done. Changes automatically based on your system preferences (light during the day, dark after sunset)
Samsung's Internet browser has a Dark Mode toggle built in, which surprised me.
But when the external lightning is bad (too high/low), dark mode is easier on the eyes.
The only exception, is when i got 3 screen, and one is in light mod, and 2 other in dark mode. It just hurt.
1) Dark mode is increasingly not exclusively about the user experience. We're seeing phones switch automatically to dark mode when batteries are low.
2) Dark mode, at least for email, has better readability by design. The dark mode algorithm swaps foreground with background and then adjusts the colors to be at least at a ratio of 4.5 to 1 (wcag 2 compliance). This means you can have unreadable white text over white background in light mode and it will actually be readable in dark mode. So having discussions about whether dark mode is more readable is kind of pointless, it was designed to be more accessible.
edit: If there is interest, I can share a desktop app that helps illustrate dark-mode changes (specifically for email). https://imgur.com/NOGT5el
Do phone displays really save energy when displaying more black pixels? I always thought that's not the case because the backlight is always on for the entire display anyway.