Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
kevq.uk
kevq.uk
No. No it doesn't.
1. I don't have that much faith in scientists. Someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career is not going to produce good advice for me.
2. Even if they were perfect scientists, they're not using my eyeballs. They're grading experiences on a bell curve and taking the median. We all experience things differently. This is the "fighter jet seat problem" - if you use the average then it fits no-one.
3. Even if I had average eyeballs (and I probably do), I doubt my situation is anything like the test subjects in the experiments. My home office isn't set up that well (I'm working on it).
4. My research, conducted using my eyeballs in my home office on my equipment, shows I prefer dark mode. I have tried both, and dark mode was the more comfortable experience. My experiment beats "multiple studies" for my situation. Yours may be different.
Sampling. It probably feels good hand-waving away the problem of "does this study apply to everyone?" by introducing the "representative sample" construct, but it has its problems and I doubt they will be ever solved. You can't speak for everyone when you have several thousands samples -- out of ~8 billion people.
This is kind of akin to that artificially absurd example of "on average, every human on Earth has one testicle". (And don't get nitpicky here, please; it might be "median" or another term, and that's not the point.)
What your parent poster says is that this article is kind of hiding behind science to be able to claim a generalisation it makes is true. Which it still isn't. Most people I asked said they prefer dark mode. Some said they like light mode. This article changes none of that.
No. If I claim everyone has 0.5 testicles, that's bad science. If I randomly choose a large enough number of subjects and report that approximately 50% have two testicles and approximately 50% have no testicles, with error bars, p-values, etc., saying that you don't trust this because I am trying to make a career and you prefer to follow your own experience, which after looking between your legs clearly shows that 100% of people have two testicles, would be quite stupid. If I chose only 3 people, or all of them are male or female, or I make any other mistake, point the mistake, but don't attack me personally, and much less science in general.
For example, I followed the link to the study by the Nielsen Norman Group and then the reference to the study of Piepenbrock. They explain well their sampling method, with different groups by age and depending on vision problems. You can clearly see the individual results and the variance, and it is obvious that generalizing to the 100% of population would be wrong, but there are some very clear trends. Calling these researchers "someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career" without any proof whatsoever is insulting.
To be clear, I do not intend that anyone changes habits because of these studies. I agree that this is subjective enough to make it a personal decision. But as a scientist trying to make a career, I found the above comment very disrespectful.
Especially in the social sciences, there's been a whole discussion recently about how our current system of evaluating and rewarding scientists is not benefitting Science. There's even been high-profile commentators disputing whether the social sciences are actually Science at all.
As you're a scientist I won't bother explaining this to you. I'm sure you're aware of the problems here.
So my point is that for a study like this, there's lots of room for playing statistical games in order to achieve a more "sensational" result that is more publishable and more likely to get cited. We know this happens and we know this is especially rife in this area of study. So I have become much more sceptical of social-science studies showing broad generalised results about a subject applying to the whole human race. Especially if those studies contravene some commonly-held view about the subject. My default position has moved from "well, they know what they're doing so there must be something to it", to "I'm going to assume that they p-hacked their way to a sensational result until I have evidence to prove otherwise".
I might be wrong in taking that stance. I will change it if I have better evidence.
I get easily triggered when science is presented as a matter of faith, but in fact I totally agree with your skeptical point of view.
The "real" science has no absolutes. But the problem is that it is very difficult for humans to operationalize it that way. Take for example eggs and cholesterol. I remember in the late 80s, my father (also a scientist/biologist) stopped eating eggs because apparently Science said eggs are bad for you (due to some papers)... later in the mid/late 90s Science said that eggs are actually not bad, but good for you (because, even if they where high on cholesterol, it was the good cholesterol).
So, for people (even other scientists!) that are not experts in the subject, it becomes a matter of belief... believe in the papers some random team published, because it was published in Nature.
> Nothing is ever proven, but it contains a method to constantly find the theory most likely to deserve your faith.
I love this quote!
Maths has proofs. Logical reasoning from first arguments that a thing is true or not. It either is, or is not, proven. End of.
Physics as applied maths, pretty solid. We need to conduct experiments to verify that nature agrees with our mathematical constructs, but on the whole these are simple and unequivocal. e.g . gravity. Particle physics gets dodgy because of the vast range of collision results - statistics starts creeping in. Rather than being able to say that particle A collides with particle B to produce particles D an E, we now have a statistical chance that somethng might happen.
Chemistry as applied physics, again, pretty solid. Everything has to be tested by experiment, and experiment frequently throws up surprises, but if a reacts with B in Chicago, it probably does in Moscow too.
Biology as applied chemistry. Mostly solid. It gets massively complex, and so the temptation to resort to statistics is overwhelming and most biological papers start talking about statistical probabilities rather than actual results. But the basic biology is mostly the same for most subjects, and if the conclusion is simple (virology and the effectiveness of vaccines, for example) then we're all good.
Any social science as applied biology: not much. This is really dodgy territory where the experiment design totally dominates the result, and the result is statistical data that has to be massaged into a definitive statement. This is p-hacking territory, where experiments are largely unreproducible, very subject to bias, cultural references, and academia politics. E.g. whether creativity shares a limited resource pool with willpower - highly subjective, highly variable between individuals, hihgly suspect if your paper cites this as a proven result.
Not all science is worthy of the same level of trust. The scientific method is trustworthy. Academia is not.
Arguing with this is like disputing the fact that high heels make for terrible running shoes. Research in question with be quite similar.
1. Start with a hypothesis, that "dark mode is less comfortable for me than light mode".
2. Design an experiment: find the sites that you use most. Use them for 10 minutes each in light mode and dark mode. Write down your impressions.
3. Build a conclusion: was your hypothesis correct? Was it partially correct for some sites?
Then you can adapt your behaviour according to your new, Scientifically-proven knowledge.
Science isn't faith-based, but there are a ton of problems with Academia and the way Science is practised and published at the moment. Science is also not connected with Academia - the scientific method doesn't need a university grant to work. You can literally conduct your own experiment in a couple of hours (as above) to get better information than any study. Not publishing it doesn't make it any less scientific.
It makes no sense to me to trust an unknown number of studies over my personal experience. I prefer dark mode. I'll stick with that. You do you.
Also, asking people their impressions can be helpful in the human aspect of the research, but quantitatively you need some sort of metric you can evaluate their experience on. For example, you'd assign a task and see how well people did comparing the two modes, while also making sure the difference is statistically significant (meaning it wasn't just as likely to be chance).
This is just the beginning of where good study design starts. You'd also do things like assigning the modes themselves randomly, so to go back to the audiophile example, I might notice if it's always x and then y, but not if it's scrambled. You'd could go further and try to stratify the groups, so for example making sure one group isn't all elderly people and the other young. It goes on and on...
So while the scientific method is nice, especially for introducing science in educational contexts, the methodology and rationale behind research is much more deliberate and involved. By all means they can try out things themselves, but no, they will not "get better information than any study".
One of the more important parts of the studies referenced in the NNGroup article the blog post in the OP is referring to is that they did experiments between people rather than subjecting people to different conditions consecutively. When the initial light-dark contrast isn't present, people's fatigue ratings were about equal for both modes.
Moreover, people perceived both modes equally hard to read, but were actually more efficient in reading lightmode text.
That advantage is driven largely by the sheer amount of light - some researchers did an experiment where they cranked up the brightness on a dark theme so the experienced brightness was the same and it was just as readable as a light theme. But then you're using a crapton of electricity since you're turning dark-hued pixels to be super bright.
Your personal experience is incapable of judging your performance in visual-acuity tasks and proofreading tasks, or determining the level of eyestrain caused when using light or dark mode.
Meanwhile, the scientists aren't trying to change your mind over which one is "more comfortable." They are trying to determine why you find something more comfortable and how well your the various options perform.
Comparing this to faith where from the start you cannot check anything doesn't make any sense (if you know that something is true or false it isn't faith anymore, that's the point).
I think this total lack of understanding of how the scientific process works is one of the biggest problems facing America today.
Otherwise, you could believe any PDF you can find on Google and know it to be true and representative. What if someone wrote a net to generate 10,000,000 studies on the same set of topics and scattered them throughout the Internet? Given a random study, you wouldn't know whether it's real or generated, without the "authority" aspect of a journal.
Now, whether or not the journals actually do a good job at authenticating the studies is another question. But, the principle stands that they are what we trust as consumers of science (a role which scientific researchers themselves play as well).
That it's conducted on humans (a.k.a. very small sample, not generalizable, non-objective metrics, hard to remove observer bias etc.)? I think regardless of personal opinion, just based on a Bayesian / base rate mental model, you should default to disbelieving any published social studies (I refuse to call it "science") that haven't been rigorously replicated.
All of those studies are studies of how other people experienced dark mode vs. normal mode.
All of my studies are studies of how I experience dark mode vs. normal mode.
I feel that my sample more closely aligns to the population I'm trying to study.
Also it mentions spectrum-shifting software like 'night light' or f.lux or whatever Android and Windows call it when they do this by default.
And the thing about dark-on-white being more visible than white-on-dark is just blatantly wrong and the military anecdote makes no sense, camo against dark background in the dark is going to be low contrast because the camo you wear in the dark is dark, muted colours.
This whole "those studies are studies of how other people experienced X" is a typical argumentation scheme of esoteric fields like homeopathy, where science, logic and data is completely rejected and replaced with pure faith. Real studies can be criticized without relying on that trap.
We are literally discussing my subjective experiences here. And you're telling me I'm wrong. About my subjective experiences.
Ohhh-kay.
As an example, one part of your mind could be extremely conditioned to want to please and be with someone who is (objectively) abusing you and so you think you're having a good time when they do show you attention, while another part of your mind hates them for hurting you. There are countless examples of how different parts of a single mind can be at odds with each other, and depending on when you think deeply about an experience, can both have enjoyed and not enjoyed an experience.
It's not unreasonable to think that similar mechanics are at play with more subtle, less social-based mechanics. Food (and drugs) have a lot of this going on too.
She looked askance, said "Well, its a little salty".
"Yeah, I guess it is."
"And not really very hot"
"Oh, yeah. Hm."
"And there no spice in it. Kinda plain."
"Dang, you're right"
So was I enjoying it? Or the experience of being out with the wife and not having to cook? Or just hungry and anything would do? And I'd mis-attributed what I was enjoying. Clearly my 'subjective experience' was not very, well, objective.
Or did you just let your wife bully you into not liking something that you, personally, actually liked?
Sure I was enjoying myself. This is kind of the point of this thread. Your enjoyment is not a real measure of what's good or bad.
1. Easier to read
2. Eye Strain
3. Battery savings
Your subjective "studies" about that are irrelevant if you put them in contrast to proper scientific studies for those things - if you don't measure them properly. And that's not how you feel about it. That's what I was saying.
And it does not matter for that whether you like dark or bright mode, whether you follow the article or speak against it :) That might be part of the confusion.
I have pretty bad eye floaters, and they're more visible in bright light. Having crud bouncing around my entire field of vision does not make for an easy or strain-free reading experience, so I enable dark mode whenever it's an option. I found checking Zulip at work pretty unpleasant until I realized I could enable dark mode.
If you're running a scientific study and basing your conclusions on the average of all participants, you might not pick up on things like that. And if you're running a scientific study on people with normal vision, a sufficiently strict definition of "normal vision" guarantees that you won't pick up on that, although the studies in question probably didn't use so strict a definition.
Even if dark mode is "scientifically worse" for most people, whatever that means, it's a useful accommodation. In fact, the Nielsen Norman Group article that this post links to argue against dark mode recommends dark mode as an accommodation for people with vision impairments.
Feeling efficient and being efficient are both valid bases for choosing, but the point of the article is that they don't have high correlation.
Dark mode could be more aesthetically pleasing, and yet could also be less legible. I have personally experienced this. Dark mode is hard to read and find my place in compared to light mode. The white space helps me absorb the information and use it effectively. I say this while I still think dark mode looks better for many apps. I just choose light mode because of utility and usability.
regardless of the sample population, the difference is asking about perception vs. designing an experiment that provides consistent measures and accounts for bias. That's the definition of science. What you're arguing is "I know what I know", i.e. faith.
It's possible one can enjoy heroin, while it's simultaneously not beneficial for them to do so.
Just because something is subjectively positive, doesn't mean it's objectively positive.
My notebook has a matte screen and barely reflects ambient light(s) back at me. I say barely to avoid saying "none" because surely someone will nitpick that it is reflecting a small amount of light etc.
The phone has a glossy screen, and it reflects every single thing it can back my eyes. Dark mode makes it even more "mirror like". And while I prefer the colours (specially if you're using the phone at night, with no ambient lights to bother), I acknowledge that it is more straining during most of the day. Even at night when it autoswitches to dark mode, I'll have some ambient illumination unless I'm at the cinema (not for a couple of months since lockdown) or basically trying to sleep (and I know I shouldn't be checking the phone if I'm trying to sleep).
Another data point: reading PDFs of books and conference papers on my computer (black on white) is tiresome, whereas reading the same on a kindle feels amazing. But then again, the kindles have won this battle a long time ago and nobody should be trying to read books or other media made for plant-based-paper on a screen anyway (and here I give e-ink a bit of leeway and consider it more plant-paper-like than a screen).
Anyway, to cut a long story short, you could be like the smoker who prefers to have another cigarette even though it's bad for him. Not only that, it's even possible to find examples of people being wrong about their own subjective experiences. For example, people sometimes have cyclic personal preferences and one of the arguments against them is that their subjective feelings are wrong.
The hidden assumption in that framing is that there's an objective measure of "what is best for them" which somehow isn't based on what people subjectively prefer.
They use full white and full black for all modes. As we know, dark theme is typically white on dark gray (or equivalent), not pure white on pure black. I can't think of any dark mode that uses pure black. (AOSP, IOS, macOS, etc.)
This alone invalidates the study, because it doesn't reflect the real world. Science is only as good as it is rigorous, and if it fails to model the real world, then it's not very good.
Science, these days, seems to have become a faith based system, because most people don't usually review the content of the studies.
That (and bad science, like this study) is a shame.
1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001872081351550...
[0] https://www.litmus.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/bildschirm...
> That (and bad science, like this study) is a shame.
Tangential, but this has indeed been a slow drift since the 1970s roughly. We are witnessing the consequences of that, now that entire generations of academics have been molded as such.
I think we need a vocal and principled reaffirmation of Positivism in science, to meaningfully move away from all the faith-based and broadly political conduct of scientific affairs at large (and the reporting thereof).
Maybe, but most published studies are close to pure garbage and even in clinical trials which is supposed to be the holy grail of Science there's cherry picking, improper design, and lack of repeatability across the board.
"Science" is only as good as the humans conducting it. Unfortunately us humans are pretty bad at doing Science.
False. If you did not do the study/experiment yourself, you are putting your faith in scientists that did. This is philosophically equivalent to someone putting their faith in, say a monk, or a pastor.
If you go one level deeper, the monk might say, 'do X penance for Y years to verify Z claim', then it's up to you whether you want to follow that route or not. Until then, his claim is not unfalsifiable, like many skeptics claim.
Even for mundane day-to-day claims, 'science', as commonly understood, falls short.
e.g. Science cannot prove to me that a mango tastes sweet, without putting the condition that I must taste it. The only 'proof' it can provide is 'Taste it and see for yourself'. If I say, 'I will only taste it AFTER you prove it is sweet', then nothing will happen. Because Taste is subjective. Yet, everyone, 'miraculously' is able to come to a consensus.
There are truths that are individually/subjectively verifiable, but collectively/objectively unverifiable.
The denigration of the former type of truths is something armchair scientists must avoid. Real scientists never denigrate them.
Science can define what a sweet taste is, by assigning it to a set of measurements that define the boundaries of sweetness, as a technical term.
Is that sweetness to you? Nobody cares. It's a technical term that you need to accept to participate in the conversation productively.
"need to accept" is a "subjective" consensus - meaning it is useless if the terminology is not accepted.
Acceptance is a subjective decision, at which point you're simply going by majority vote. And majority is not a barometer for truth.
Science absolutely cares about subjective acceptance, and faith in experts.
That doesn't mean I preach to someone that they shouldn't be drinking wine because beer is superior.
These sorts of model, which are presented as capital S Science, are at best guesstimates, that don't receive nearly the amount of popular coverage when they shown to be wrong in the fullness of time (or indeed need to be reinforced by changing data). If a model is no better than a coin toss that's faith based to me.
A recent example; WHO "walks backs" statement made a day before about data showing that asymptomatic carriers infecting others is very rare. At the same time saying between 6% and 41% of the population may be asymptomatic with a 16% error margin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im0G7jb78jc
I doubt the rigor of MOST studies.
At least read the studies talk about and their setups, otherwise this kind of sentiment is what also gives us all sorts of out-there beliefs.
This article is talking about a subjective experience.
The earth is a slightly flattened sphere regardless of what you or I choose to believe.
Dark mode is more productive for me in my experience. And showing me concrete proof that other people are more productive in light mode is not going to change that. It's still going to be more productive for me regardless of how many other people find it less productive.
I think this is the core of why we have such out-there beliefs at the moment: everyone believes they live in their own reality, and their subjective opinions trump objective reality. Partly, I think this is due to social sciences attempting to make objective reality out of statistical analysis of subjective opinions. A million people believing the earth is flat doesn't make it so, yet that's exactly what social science says.
- Better rendering of hues. This comes in nice for things like syntax coloring, or photo editing. The eye is evaluating a color next to the absence of light, instead of next to washed out light.
- Less eye strain when ambient light is insufficient. Ideally the brightness of the screen should be within the same range of brighness as the surroundings.
In my home office, I have about 20,000 lumens of light shining in a relatively small space, at a temperature of 5000K. In other words, it's a sunny day in my office regardless of the weather or the time of day. A quick and easy way to figure out if you have enough light (or too much) is to step back and point your cell phone camera at your workspace. Take a photo without HDR mode. Can you make out details of what's on your screen AND its surroundings? For most people, the screen will be washed out because the ambient light is way underpowered. Dark mode is a good response to that situation.
With quality and variable lighting, you can have the best setup: use light mode during the day; switch to dark mode when it suits you, whether it be for a task that works better in that mode or for evening time when you prefer to start sending a signal of sleepiness to your body.
To what extent are these studies testing these sub-optimal reading conditions? Are they just testing optimal conditions which could have different results?
A nice bright working area sounds nice. Bonus if it's good light, and not something that will feel unnatural.
Sidenote: I've got a nice big window that I face, and I often want it open, but my room is so dark I have to keep it mostly closed as it overpowers my monitor, eyes, etc.
When selecting light, I pay attention to the temperature of the light (I like 5000K for daylight) and the Color Rendering Index (CRI) which is a measure of the quality of light. Technically you can make "white" with only 3 wavelengths, however the broader the spectrum of light (many wavelengths), the better it shows on reflected surfaces. It's not highly relevant to the topic of eye strain with screens but it's a nice touch that makes the area more comfortable.
Recently, I started exploring LED lights and there are some really good options appearing on the market. I tested some spot lights with a CRI of 92 which look even better than halogens. So when it comes time for me to replace my CFLs, I might end up with a better option.
Personally, I prefer indirect light. So I have light strips which illuminate the wall behind my monitor , and a few other bulbs directed at the ceiling which reflect light back down.
Similar trick to you, I just try to reduce brightness until it looks like a kindle—it’s matte and blends in with other objects in room.
If you have a study that shows that most people do(n't) like pineapple on pizza (maybe make a blog post "is pineapple on pizza such a good idea?"), that is rather unrelated to someone likeing pineapple on pizza or not and is not claiming that all people don't like pineapple on pizza.
Darkmode is a nice thing! It feels like some people hype it as the 'one true better solution to everything' or a strictly superior version, when it boils down to preferance and minor differences. In the end you probably want to have both options (if you have the capacity to support them).
You're proving the point, how would you even know for sure if you are A or B? You would have to try it out anyway.
If we all dismissed science to serve our preferences and prejudices, we'd still be in the dark ages. No pun intended.
And my point was that my anecdotal preferences are massively more important for me than any scientific study, no matter how rigorous.
Suppose your mechanic mess up your car. Suppose this happen again with a second mechanic, and maybe even a third. Is that enough to justify the conclusion that “mechanics are bad”? I don’t think so. Science is the same.
Maybe not, but it's certainly enough to justify the conclusion that "mechanics should not be blindly trusted". Same with scientists. Doing good science is hard, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if most studies are flawed.
Also, there's a reason the concept of independent verification is so important in science. Even if the scientists doing a study are trying their best to do good science, it's incredibly easy to make a mistake. A healthy dose of skepticism is very much warranted.
That doesn't mean I think you should believe your senses either. It means it's worth looking into it further (if you care, at least).
well I guess you have faith or dogma to fall back on, then. Safe travels!
About that, it's surprising that there's so much papercuts in the scientific field these days. p-hacking, lack of peer reviews, journal gatekeeping, also some ex-engineer turned pseudo cosmologist [0] said that there's too much technological 'papers' and not enough fundamentals, which dillute the quality of thinking and the seal of quality attached to the scientific method
(the man is a controversial figure, most people would consider him a nutsack, but I can agree with the fact that research has shifted in meaning compared to early 20th century)
Of course. All you are measuring is how comfortable you feel, which is irrelevant. What they are measuring is how well people actually perform on tasks while using dark mode. Just because dark mode feels better to you doesn't imply anything about the latter question.
If you don't feel well you likely aren't going to perform well. If your eyes hurt, you are going to want to stop working. If I had to stare at a bright white screen all day, I wouldn't get the task done because it hurts my eyes. Common sense.
Yet another study where it's trying to trump opinion with a study. You can't be wrong if you prefer dark mode/light mode, it's subjective. A study is going to have a real hard time proving one is "better" than the other and we certainly shouldn't take the results on faith.
I found where blue light causes eye strain, and it most certainly does, I immediately notice the difference when using a blue light filter on my monitor, but you can have both dark mode and a blue light filter enabled.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6020759/
Anecdotally, dark mode causes my eyes and my partner's eyes less strain.
You can notice by how dry and red they get, as well as the headaches, it's not rocket science.
EDIT (reached my post limit)
@shawnz: No, the light physically hurts. It's immediate. It's not because of the aesthetics.
I don't think this is "rocket science" but that doesn't mean it is handwavingly obvious either
Having said that I think my preferences are mainly, if not entirely, aesthetic. Dark-on-light terminals feel weird as do light-on-dark documents/spreadsheets - that can't be anything other than just what I'm used to.
Better?
If you want to truly understand how you specifically react to something, then do science yourself. You don't need to be very rigorous with this, as the goal isn't to prove some huge effect size. The goal is to just get an objective answer to the question of whether you are more productive, rather than a subjective (and therefore very likely wrong) one. Find an objective measure of your own personal performance (anything you care about, doesn't have to be something a boss would care about); maybe find a way to blind yourself to which days you're using the treatment vs. a placebo; write down numbers; and then stick 'em in Excel and see what you get.
I would point at Gwern as a good example of someone who runs self-experiments to determine the objective n=1 effects of different "life hacks" on things they care about. (For Gwern, this is usually brain performance—measured by, among other things, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back task, data for which can be collected in the form of "playing" a quick round of a computer game.) For example, here's their look into magnesium supplementation: https://www.gwern.net/nootropics/Magnesium
The placebo effect is fairly strong. And how productive someone feels vs how productive they actually are when it's measured often varies, of course.
I value my feelings in a pleasant work environment a hell of a lot more than productivity metrics.
sorry, but is there a link to this? A quick Google showed only issues with the F-35's ejection system.
"reading white text from a black screen or tablet may be a way to inhibit myopia, while conventional black text on white background may stimulate myopia"
I am unaware of any fighter jet seat problem. If you use the average, you're actually pretty likely (depending on the shape of the distribution, which in the case of phenotypes like body size, are normally distributed when broken down by gender) to find the size that accomodates the most people (you could also consider using the median, or the most populated class, or add a few adjustable parts).
Science hasn't reached the point where it can create truly personalized models that account for your genetics, personal feelings, and other details about your setup. It would be nice if we had that kind of ability, but the data isn't there (either the quality or quantity of the data). however, it's generally understood that these sorts of studies provide useful evidence for people who are making policy for large numbers of people.
Also, what you did at home wasn't an experiment (did you use positive and negative controls and blinding), it was just a measurement of your personal preferences. Again, not trying to deny your personal experience, but a good scientific study does trump your actual experience, when applied to the population at large.
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
I don't know that it's "pretty famous", as I find only a few references to it (the book I mentioned, the article you mentioned, and a few other references).
I worked in biology for a long time and work with ML datasets that make money based on statistical analysis of people properties and the idea that "no one is average" is technically correct and also completely missing the point of scientific analysis (I definitely acknowledge that science doesn't do a good job with personalization).
I'm sorry you haven't heard of it but it's fairly well known.
Here's it on QI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch9UuMFwzCE
They had an assortment of very expensive mannequins rigged up with a multitude of sensors to determine strain or torsional effects that were used to determine whether the ejection was "survivable." I believe the certification process included the smallest possible dummy that could survive the seat ejection, and the largest that would fit.
Too small and the seat couldn't be rigged with enough ballast to prevent the acceleration of the ejection motor from crushing the pilot's spine. Too large and the seat wouldn't clear the tail or other aircraft structures. If I understand it correctly, the seats are configured to the pilot for this reason.
It's absolutely true that designing around averages is not how ejection seats are constructed or, for that matter, tested.
"no-one is average" is more than technically correct. If your scientific analysis is missing this key point about humans, then it's basically worthless because it doesn't apply to real humans. This is what the US Air Force found: you have to personalise. You can never apply a generic result to an individual and have a good outcome.
Using the average sometimes works, some times doesn't. Number of arms an average person has is less than 2.
Definitely check out the fighter jet seat problem.
And that’s how we got to 2020 with anti-vaccine and flat-earth.
It’s science. Axioms and data. You don’t need faith.
Got better data? Cause “I like it better” isn’t.
>Many people perceive light mode as the cause of eye strain. But blue light, among other things, is actually the cause of it most of the time. This is covered in more detail by Vice, where they say:
>>A 2018 study published in BMJ Open Ophthalmology notes that blue light could be a factor in eye tiredness, but cites dry eyes from not blinking for long periods as a more serious cause of eye strain, as well as too-small fonts, and conditions like uncorrected astigmatism.
It may be that when you use dark mode, because of the lack of blue light you feel better. But perhaps you can test this by installing something like [Flux](https://justgetflux.com/) to see if that also helps.
This is how I always feel about design/UI/UX/etc research: They remove functionality and make things more clumsy and then claim it's Good For Me. They unironically cite to design "fundamentals" without consideration for culture or even personal preference [0] as if any such things could exist. Is it any coincidence the most designed websites are a narrow strip of gray-on-gray text lost in a site which won't even load without heavyweight JS?
Although for me it’s a ridiculous thing to even bother trying to measure. The problem isn’t whether it’s slightly better to look at a dark or light background but rather that we spend so much time staring at screens that it becomes a problem.
By the way, in case it is “just” a feeling, I’ll say up front I share the feeling too. I think worth considering for every empirical study.
If you like sitting in a bright room, you'll prefer light mode; dark room, dark mode.
I would be very interested in a study that looks at how much of the dark/light color scheme preference is just due to habit and esthetics.
If one can't even express doubt about some academic papers (note how different it is to expressing doubt on the whole idea of "science"), which exist in the millions, then things are pretty messed up. A lot of commenters are either incapable of some basic reading comprehension or are deliberately misinterpreting it.
Yes, it is. One thing is reading a newspaper in which text amounts to a good percentage of the available area, and the rest reflects ambient light, and a whole different thing is a screen with some text in the middle and the free area emitting white light right to my eyes, de facto saturating them.
I would never read a white text on black paper newspaper, neither in the dark nor in the light, but I surely find dark mode on screens a billion times more readable than traditional light modes. Useable e-paper displays might change that one day, but the technology is still in its infancy.
At work my brightness dial is down to 0. At home it's at 16.
It looks wrong at first, but you'll get used to it within a day or so. Colleagues coming to your desk will remark upon it.
Note how text on e-ink is excellently readable but photos look like crap—since they aren't carefully selected and adjusted for the medium like in print.
On screens, black text on a-bit-gray-with-a-hint-of-red is better, like here on HN, though still not the same. I wonder if it's possible to get close to paper/e-ink colors on an LCD/OLED screen, or the backlight's color profile is too different (apparently LEDs emit narrow bands of wavelengths, which might be harsher for the eyes—while sunlight and incandescent lights have all or most of the visible spectrum).
If I look at my laptop on full brightness in a nearly pitch black room, it is far less comfortable to read than if I turned on a lamp.
So there are two solutions to this. Turn on a lamp if you're using a screen at night time, and lower your brightness to have roughly the same level as the ambient light.
Or, use night mode if you don't want to turn a lamp on.
If I'm doing something like programming, I prefer the former. If I'm just in bed and feeling lazy and want to read twitter, I go for the latter so I don't have to turn a lamp on.
Yes. My use case is reading ebooks at night on a Kindle app in Dark Mode so that I don't disturb my partner who is trying to sleep.
Dark mode is also very often buggy, clumsy, the color schemes for syntax highlight are subjectively less pleasing, it feels gloomier, less cheerful, I see more distracting dust on the screen, smudges etc. Yeah I could also clean it more etc. The point is there can be multiple equilibra, one develops habits and preferences. It's not an absolute thing.
There is more to this than all the biological talk too.
I use it as a context switch and prefer to review code in light mode, while i prefer to write code in dark mode.
Either it helps with the context switching or reading is just easier in light mode, while writing is easier in dark mode because its easier focus in on what im writing.
I think given a lot of people prefer dark mode for various things, people should assume they lack all the information for making bold claims based on biological studies alone.
Some people never exercise and live to 90 years. Some people are night owls and do their best work at 3 AM and have no concept of a schedule but get stuff done brilliantly. Others have to dogmatically stick to a schedule and a rigid morning and evening routine and swear by waking up at 4:30.
Partially it's their genetics but a huge part is habits and adaptation. Humans can function in the polar circle, in the jungle, on the savanna, in urban hell, in the suburbs, on farms etc.
Any study that wants to test the difference in benefits of different habits would need to allow for the adaptations to take place, the adjacent habits to adjust to the new style etc. You cannot just take one thing in isolation. Maybe I like light color schemes because I do most of my work in the daylight and sleep at night. There can be tons of confounders and doing months long randomized studies is rare.
I fixed that particular issue by making my own color schemes.
I am probably the only user, but this is OK.
Then it's easy to adjust the screen's brightness/turn on lights until the screen is not overexposed/the environment is not underexposed.
Supposedly if this is done fast enough it's not unhealthy, but it's a case of "no solid evidence it's bad for you" plus anecdotal links to headaches. I have personally had drastically fewer screen headaches since leaving my hardware brightness on 100% and lowering brightness via the driver.
I'm a believer in the spectrum thing, too. I find halogens way easier on the eyes than ultra-power-saving diodes.
When you read a book or a newspaper the brightness naturally fits with ambient light. It's hard on the eyes to read a book on the beach because of the brightness (same effect as a snowy landscape under the sun).
Dark modes usually lower the brightness overall and reduce the contrast with ambient light as well.
the s/n on white background is very high.
the s/n on a black background is terrible (reflection easily overwhelm the signal)
young eyes don't care
older eyes, with less ability to reshape the lens of the eye need extra light to close down the pupil and put more stuff in focus without eyestrain.
A good black and white (true grayscale CRT display) in a properly lit room can be eminently readable and cause very little eye strain. However, as soon as you start to use color and images, and/or the room isn't properly lit, it seems the level of contrast necessary for make colour look right - especially in images - also tend to make white backgrounds far too bright. According to my experience the effect get worse the bigger the screen is.
It does seem to be an issue, but not really a problem with the text versus background color, rather because we handle gamut/contrast/color the same way in both UI elements, on screen text, and images. While this might partially be down to the last decades dominance of LCD screens with rather poor color rendering that nobody has cared to fix it, the color profiles of UI, text, and images should really be adjusted separately.
So why does dark background seemingly alleviate this issue for some fraction of people? I don't know for sure, it could be the brain "averages" light over a small area, when determining some global brightness/contrast measure, thus making might on black seem less contrasty while still allowing use of brightness/color range that also works reasonably well for images?
I notice my daughter brought up with screens around seem to care less, but that could be a coincidence.
The first time I saw one of these in the flesh, it was striking. I'd be surprised if this kind of context-awareness in screens didn't work its way into most devices within the next decade.
Better systems could let you calibrate multiple points, so they would interpolate instead if extrapolate, but even a single point calibration would be amazing.
FWIW, I've tried dark mode and have to enlarge font sizes to read stuff compared to using very dim setting on my screens and light mode. I felt like I was in minority so didn't bother with exploring further.
But, I did realise and investigate blinking issue (I've got dry eyes, worse due to contacts and lots of screen time). I even have a few experiments in mind (like the typing break apps of old, I want my computer to trigger my blinking without adverse effects; whether it's by bluring content for a couple ms at a time to trigger eye refocus and blink, or whether it's something else, I still need to test it).
I think the article mentions this indirectly, but then attributes it. Your pupils are going to adjust to the amount of light entering them a lot (most?). This means like a camera, a smaller hole will be less sensitive to focal problems.
So, unless you perfectly compensated for the amount of light coming from your display its likely the brighter backgrounds were dumping more light, reducing your pupils and making things clearer.
Apart from that, I think it mostly comes down to the fact that an LCD pixel doesn't actually change it's reflected colour when it starts emitting light of a different colour. This means that incident light falling upon the pixel and being reflected will necessarily become noise -- it won't contribute to the image. For instance, if the colour of the LCD surface is some kind of grey and the LCD is emitting green, the resulting colour will be
incident * r_reflected + emitted
On the other hand, if you had a green coloured paper, then there is no emitted component so it becomes just
incident * r_reflected
The main barrier is that almost all modern GUIs depend on high refresh rates, but it's not hard to imagine a GUI designed from the ground-up for ePaper. Little-to-no transitions, pagination instead of scrolling, maybe a customized version of Firefox with a prominent Readability toggle, etc
(quick intro): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytpRnRke6I0
(starting the breakdown): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NfX0vlCa4k
He talks about that exact concept and moves on to do real-world testing and setup of a very specific tablet usable as an external display.
It's exactly as you say: Hacky and unpolished. But I found it extremely informative.
The Boox Max 3 e-ink tablet can be used as an external monitor (HDMI connection) with good refresh rate.
Dasung Paperlike 3 is a dedicated e-ink external monitor that can actually play video with really good refresh rate.
Waveshare also makes e-ink external monitor, not as good as the Paperlike but coming at half the price.
Doesn't unnecessary refresh deterioration the e-ink display and diminish its power efficiency? I really see no reason for the display to refresh until the actual information you need to view changes. What do you need a higher refresh rate for? Wobbly window effects, smooth scrolling, verbose build output and intense action games?
I really don't want the screens to adapt by increasing refresh rates, I want the software to adapt by ditching scrolling for pagination, giving up unnecessary visual effects, decreasing verbosity (only displaying what I really want to see) etc.
As you say, every app and website would need to be completely redesigned to work with e-paper. I don't see that happening, but even then typing or editing text with a long delay is very annoying, as anyone who has used SSH over a slow connection will tell you.
Are you sure? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xqkWga0PFo
That's because the damn smooth visual effects. Most of the transitions between these states are animated in a multiple number of frames. There would be no problem if it switched straight to the target state. Also scrolling should be replaced with pagination and zooming should ask you to enter the percentage rather than let you zoom visually.
> As you say, every app and website would need to be completely redesigned to work with e-paper.
I really wish every app to be designed that way anyway - that would mean less of pointless fun but much more of eye and brain comfort.
I don't know if there is a scientific paper on this but it feels like moving stuff depletes brain resources much faster, causing more stress and attention deficit.
The only thing I want displayed is what really needs to be displayed (exactly what I have came to view + some useful auxiliary information perhaps). The only thing to update at any given moment of time is what really needs to be updated.
As for smooth transition visual effects I have always hated them altogether and always disabled them on every PC I used.
https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/boyue-likebo....
Well, it's very dogmatic.
Sure, for you it may be better, and if you "would never read a white text on black paper newspaper", it is fine.
At the same time, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. If you have a research paper that Dark Mode is better for everyone, please share.
The article is also quite dogmatic though.
I run termux on top stock boox 3 as a thin(ish) client and it works amazingly well. It's some of the most enjoyable terminal time I have had in years because it's so limited.
Photos are still photons. You can adjust the brightness of the monitor to be the same of a newspaper that reflects your favorite light intensity.
I'm sure there's software that does that, but Dark mode seems like the easy-no-extra-work solution to this problem.
Does it matter? I mean, do you have to have a reason for preferring dark mode? I like dark mode because it looks better (to me).
I also prefer multi-color boxer shorts over white briefs. Does there have to be a justification? No. It's an aesthetic choice just like dark-mode, font-size, and color-temperature.
Black text (real black, not this fancy grey web designers seem to prefer) and white background on a properly adjusted monitor where the white doesn't blind you is my go-to since monitors became good enough to make it possible.
YMMV, of course.
Convinced?
// Was and remain in the amber camp.
/// See also: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/
”... we strongly recommend that designers allow users to switch to dark mode if they want to — for three reasons: (1) there may be long-term effects associated with light mode; (2) some people with visual impairments will do better with dark mode; and (3) some users simply like dark mode better.”
And from a StackOverflow discussion:
Visual fatigue research: Unfortunately I could not find very much research which measured computer screen visual fatigue in comparison to black-on-white text as opposed to white-on-black. The only piece I could find was a short reference in "Reading text from computer screens" by Mills and Weldon (1987) from the journal ACM Computing Surveys. Section 4.1 of that paper, titled "polarity", goes over important works at the time, including this piece:
”In contrast to the results in these studies, Cushman [1986] found that subjects who read continuous text from positive contrast (light character) VDTs reported less visual fatigue (as measured on a subjective rating scale) than those who read from negative contrast (dark character) VDTs.”
I have it too, and couldn't figure out in the past why text sometimes looks horribly blurry and sometimes doesn't. With this knowledge, I realized that dark background is likely a factor.
So I like dark mode for the OS interface because it gets out of my way then, and just plain looks better. Same in apps where I click on icons and look at images, like in image editors. For reading, dark mode is torture—both with bright white text and low-contrast dark. When sites begin to switch to the dark mode following the browser, I'll have to disable that in the browser settings or deal with bright system and app interface.
However, why I can and do code with dark themes is a mystery. I even tried to bend Emacs to use a light theme for Org-mode and a dark one otherwise (not much luck, though).
I do wish that screens in the ‘light mode’ were closer to paper in terms of eye comfort. I had an e-ink device, and it was a godsend, pure bliss—you'd think that lower contrast would make reading harder but no. Something like HN's ‘black on a bit grayish with a hint of red’ emulates the experience somewhat. Just don't make text gray, please.
In related news, I'm irked that I can't have high monitor brightness for photographic images but lower for swathes of white background under text and in Jony Ive's bright flat windows. Because, you know, photos don't tend to have flood-fill of 100% white. Maybe I'll kludge something up for the browser to amend this.
Even without one, the brighter background will constrict your pupils more, giving you a wider field of view and better focus.
The reason dark-themed terminal and coding is fine, might be the monospace fonts. They are square-ish, so there is less need to find the edges accurately. They are also eligible on very cheap, trashy screens. As a side effect, code is readable in dark themes even with astigmatism. (No source, just a wild guess)
It doesn't make anything by itself, the difference in brightness between text and background is. I have a severe astigmatism on one eye, HN page with smaller font size is easier to read with it than a green-on-black terminal (same Noto Mono font). Red or blue colors for text on black background are also slightly harder to read due to the perception.
I have good vision: no known issues, regular eye checkups, etc. But I find it nearly impossible to read most displays that use blue LEDs. If the background is blue (eg: timex indiglo watch) then it's fine. But blue leds on some of my home theater equipment drive me insane. Even if it isn't the letters/numbers themselves and it's just a regular circular power led, I find them really hard to look at.
10 years later I developed astigmatism in both eyes. Dark mode is really blurry in some settings.
The blue light thing, as I understand it, is where you first begin to notice astigmatism. The wavelength is shorter and a very slight astigmatism becomes more apparent.
I like the solarized themes where it's not very light nor very dark but somewhere in between.
Dark mode is usefull and is not something new.
When car had integrated navigation system, the screen would go in dark mode if external lightning is too low.
I felt like I’m getting eye strain. And difficulty focusing. I ended up with glasses 3 weeks ago for “computer vision” I can’t wear them walking around the house as it makes me feel dizzy. But in front of the computer it makes a difference.
Think I’m gonna try find a good theme and try light mode for a while.
Edit: Except the iPhone 11, cos I get better battery life based on my usage. It's 7pm now, and phone has been unplugged since 8am, based on my usage its at 79%.
I started working from home in January due to the virus so my hours have gone from 10am - 6pm to 8am - 10pm. Working with lights off. Getting up less. :(
As for contact lenses, afaik they're trash with computers because they make the eye dryer in addition to what you already get due to blinking more rarely. At least that's how it was back in the day, when I didn't last more than a month or so with contacts at computers.
The thing that really makes a difference for me is screen resolution (or more accurately, pixels per inch) on a modern 27" 4K I have far far fewer issues than I had on a 1280x1024 17" LCD - part of that is improvements in brightness/contrast and the technology as well though.
I live in Wales, a country where our default weather is "meh". I live on the dark side of a mountain. I work in a room with no external windows. Yes I use dark modes, and if you used light mode in my office I'd think you were a fucking nutcase, but I'd leave you to it because that's your choice.
Light mode in my office is painful, dark mode in bright sunshine doesn't work. Shocker.
The parent article here is actually difficult for me to read; the text appears to have ghostly halos for me. Perhaps I'm being hypocritical when my own blog (https://senryu.pub/afternoonrobot) isn't much different; although I made a concious effort there to make sure it inverts easily with iOS dark-mode/Dark Reader etc.
I have the ghosting halos too but this is something that you need to see an optician for. It can be corrected for but might have different sideeffects that you can or cannot live with :-) For me the world is slightly tipping over to the left if I use the glasses I'm supposed to use. And looking down and then up again is also very hard still after a year.
In the Windows 95 era, we really could just flip a few settings in our OS and everything[0] would conform to our color and font preferences. Unfortunately we have no regressed to the point that only two options are offered, and even then only sometimes.
Hooray for progress.
[0] very nearly everything.
Dark mode really gets me though. I've been doing themes on X11 since 1995 at least. You could even do themes on Windows 3.x. Why is everyone killing so much time and energy discussing this binary mode "feature" in 2020? It makes no goddamn sense.
You don't have lamps? I think most people prefer to have properly lit rooms, and then you also want a light theme on the computer. If you like sitting in the darkness this might not apply to you.
Though I generally prefer dark modes myself, something like this article might inform a developer as to which mode they will develop first and which they will set as a default.
Anecdotally, I prefer light-themed marketing landings with dark-themed application environments.
One of Apple's biggest innovations imho was to make brightness +/- two of the default keyboard buttons. Every keyboard should replace their F-keys with brightness by default (seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate.)
TV's should do this too. With smart TV's/rokus/firesticks/whatever, what's the use of having a channel toggle? Repurpose that for one-button brightness shifts. I don't need my TV being a spotlight into my face when I turn it on to watch a movie at night with the lights dimmed.
Dark mode and red shift are helpful, but really this thread nails it... it's relative contrast that is the big eyestrain contributor. It should be as easy to change brightness as it is volume.
Microsoft copied this with the Surface Book (at least). And in typical Microsoft style, the dedicated brightness buttons control the brightness of the keyboard internal LEDs. Changing Windows' screen brightness is one of the metakeys + del/backspace, not indicated on them.
If the keyboard has media keys, then, generally speaking, F2 and F3 will be linked to brightness by default.
By dumb luck I just found that it's ScrLk and Pause/Break that do brightness controls on my external monitor on os-x.
I wish apple made it as easy to remap these kinds of global shortcut keys as IDE's do.
That’s not even a joke.
I only recently learned about it myself while setting up a new monitor and asking myself wtf is this DDC/CI setting in the menu.
ddccontrol -r 0x10 -w ${NUM}0 dev:/dev/i2c-${DEV_NUM}
BACKLIGHT_PATH="/sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness"
sh -c "echo ${NUM} > $BACKLIGHT_PATH"
Mainframe programmers.
They are an essential part of interacting with an IBM mainframe (even for basic things like paging up and down through documents).
I'm sorry, what?
I use them all the time. F5 for refreshing all kinds of stuff, or for setting breakpoints in my IDE. F7, F8, F9 for controlling the debugger, other combinations for building/running. F12 for opening developer tools in the browser. Some programs still use F1 for help. F2 in Windows explorer for renaming things. And so on and so forth.
I can't stand keyboards without function keys, or where you have to press Fn to activate them.
The numeric keypad is useful to me too. A bit less than the function keys, perhaps, but when entering a list of numbers it works so much better. What's more: keyboards without numeric keypad also tend not to have the section with ins/del, home/end, pgup/pgdn and arrow keys; instead those keys are often arranged in cumbersome and inconsistent layouts. I use those a lot too.
I don't know in exactly which meaning you use the word "atavism", but I do know that having all these keys available, in a familiar layout, is very very useful to me.
Removing them would break compatibility with an awful lot of things, including Windows itself (which lots of people run using Bootcamp or Parallels). Maybe they're weird, I don't know. Momentum is a powerful force, especially when it comes to software design.
Also for the record, Print Screen takes a screenshot on Windows (and on a lot of Linux systems), which is intuitive and simple. Just because you don't use it doesn't mean it's an abandoned key.
This is one of the reasons I absolutely love my Apple display. It changes brightness automatically and most of the time it does it right.
Also, DDC/CI is a thing and (sometimes) works.
On Windows, I've found Twinkle Tray on the store works reasonably well.
For Linux there's ddcci-dkms on Ubuntu and ddcci-driver-linux-dkms for Arch Linux (on the AUR). They allow configuring the brightness as a regular backlight device. See the Arch Linux Wiki [0].
[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backlight#External_moni...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel [2] https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl
Even with brightness adjustments, working in complete dark at night the dark mode is much easier to use. The keyboard lights on the lowest level is a bit too bright in these conditions, white screens are a punch in the face for me.
There are things other than black-on-white and the inverse. I've been using Solarized dark where possible for years, especially in code windows. White-on-black is horrible, but pastel colors on a slate blue-gray background is the most comfortable option for me.
This is what I like about iOS (and probably every OS has it): after sundown, turn on dark mode.
I noticed when I'm working in the morning or generally when it's bright outside, it's sooo much more relaxing with black on white text. With night mode, I'd need to up the brightness way more to be able to comfortably read and type. It was sort of a revelation to me because the "night mode is better" mindset was so engrained into my mind at that point.
This is why prefers-color-scheme is the perfect mechanism for this. Simply swap out your CSS variables and automatically your site is immediately more accessible to people who prefer dark mode.
It's like saying discussions about whether cigarettes are good or bad for you are pointless, the important thing is that people are able to buy them if they want.
In fact, research like that i call bullshit, its like 'research' food, 'scientists' found out that that people prefer yellow carrots because red is a warning color.
Your comparison to the cigarette discussion is an interesting point. The article didn't present anything particularly strong in regards to studies around this though so I'm unsure what there is to discuss, aside from speculation on whats good and bad for our eyes. If we're speculating I'd wager regular breaks and getting away from your screen as much as possible is far more impactful that which color scheme you choose.
This is the reason why I use dark mode now. Eye strain and saving battery I don't think about. Easier to read? Sure, because it's my preference. I even use lights behind my monitors to counteract the "flash" you get when you switch from a dark IDE to a white web browser. I don't like complete _darkness_, I just like the look.
But, as a site owner it's my prerogative on the decisions I make regarding design. It's not always about choice :)
The only time I can even consider using light mode is mid-day with plenty of natural light around. At night when all the lights are dim, even the lowest brightness on my laptop (which is quite low), plus redshift, plus blue-blocking glasses, isn't enough to be comfortable in light mode. I use the "Deluminate" extension for Chrome to make all sites dark, all the time.
Perhaps I'm unusually sensitive to light (I think I am), but based on the comments here I think I'm far from alone.
That's probably why people want to be vocal about it (not as much as said bro culture still)
> This post is day 04 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. If you want to get involved, you can get more info from https://100daystooffload.com.
I find that the intent behind publishing any piece of content is an incredibly accurate predictor for its usefulness in my experience. When you can ascertain that of course. But essentially, my rule of thumb is that if the chain of events looks like this:
1. I really want to write a blog post
2. What should it be about?
then I won't find much useful in it, regardless of the topic. But if it's the other way around:
1. I really want to share this idea of mine
2. What medium should I use to deliver it?
then I often find it useful to me, again regardless of the topic.
Funnily enough, the title of the author's next blog post in this series captures this idea well: "Writing With SEO In Mind"
And it's far easier to tolerate an instance of dark mode in a lighter-themed environment than the reverse because the initial switch is so much more jarring than light->dark (which can also be jarring, but it's not as jarring)
(If you meant your comment to be "I found this works for me: ..." or "Have you tried ...?", then write it that way. The imperative mood is off-putting.)
FWIW: On my laptop, which I use most of the time these days, I adjust the brightness continually, probably 20+ times a day, and keep it pretty low. (I buy Thinkpads partly because their minimum brightness is so low.) On my desktop monitor, which is more annoying to adjust, I actually keep it at 0 most of the time, and bump it to 35 when the sun is out.
Granted, I use it too. Both my terminal and editor have dark themes. I’m not really sure why. The terminal isn’t really a big deal to me. I could go either way there. But I’ve just never found a lighter color theme that wasn’t offensive in an editor. I always try them for a bit and end up switching back.
That doesn't make sense. Why does light from white text scatter, but not light from white background?
The effect you're describing is correct, but the mechanism isn't. Aperture (pupil) size directly affects how focused the image is. The smaller the aperture, the sharper the image is. As an extreme example, if your aperture is a single point (a pinhole camera), the image can be focused without a lens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture#Maximum_and_minimum_a...
>I couldn’t find a scientific source on this, but a couple articles called it the “Halation effect”.
Articles describing this seems to say it's caused by the film medium, rather than being an optical effect.
Yeah, I noticed that. Searching the term directly gave me results related to film, but when I used other terms describing the effect they mentioned it in a different context. Makes me wonder if someone is just confused.
Diffraction limits the sharpness, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system. Pesky wave nature of light in action.
> Articles describing this seems to say it's caused by the film medium, rather than being an optical effect.
Halation in film is caused by reflection from the back of the film. Most of them have an anti-halation layer to reduce this effect. I don't see any reason why one's eye wouldn't also be vulnerable to this effect (and probably has some biological mechanism to prevent light from being reflected out of the eye. Cats sure don't have this, though.)
Specifically, bright light results in a small pupil which allows for better focus. And low light results in a large pupil which reduces focus.
For me, it’s because too much white background feels like staring directly at a light globe for several hours a day, and it hurts my eyes.
"On a biological level, our eyes prefer the contrast between a light background and dark foreground."
On a biological level, our eyes prefer not to stare at a light source all day every day. Yet here we are.
For monitors, you should be adjusting the brightness frequently and in accordance with the ambient light level.
If you do that, you should perceive the background of your light mode content as neutral and so inoffensive that you don't even notice it.
The differentiating idea behind it is that for dark syntax themes, it makes sense to have the foreground of text be different colors. In contrast, for light syntax themes, it makes sense to have the background of text be different colors.
Atom: https://github.com/biletskyy/flatwhite-syntax Sublime Text 3: https://github.com/Willamin/flatwhite
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/3429
I ran into this trying to do a Code theme a few months ago. (My favorite light theme -- and I am mostly a light theme person, as I have never believed dark mode was a particularly good idea except for terminal windows -- is the default theme from the all-but-defunct Mac editor Espresso, which used subtle background coloring in some places.)
I spent ages hunting for a VSCode theme that wasn't just a blob of undifferentiated white. Turns out, now light themes are designed as dark themes first, flipped and just generally obey the rules of dark themes (eg. color pops out a ton in dark mode, it's a much more balanced part of the UI in a positive polarity environment and can be used more liberally).
We used to just design UIs, and most of what people started calling light themes were actually just "normal, not trying to be obsessively dark UI design". Normal UI design has really wide latitude to use a lot of stuff, dark theme is a much more narrow, specific philosophy in comparison. Take a look at eg. Office apps. The default "light" theme isn't super white, it's called "Colorful", is colorful, and it looks great. It just does what looks good without trying to be especially light or dark and surprise surprise, it works.
What did I end up with? Visual Studio Blue. All the different UI things are various very distinct shades of blue so the app has a characterful look and the UI elements are clearly differentiated, and the background has a slightly yellow hue to it. Does it look a little early 2000s-y? Yes. But it works.
It makes sense to use research to make a decision that is based on data that applies equally across a population. But for something that is a personal preference, it doesn't make as much sense to rely on population-level data. If you started using dark mode because you liked it, then you shouldn't stop using it because, on average, the general population performs marginally better with light mode.
I work for a business that does contract work, and I find myself working from a variety of offices, including one in my apartment. In offices where there's often a lot of ambient light, dark mode is substantially harder to read due to the added glare. In offices with low ambient light, light mode becomes more likely to cause eye-strain. This can be compensated for to a certain degree by changing the brightness and contrast settings on the monitor, but it's not a complete panacea.
Of course, the whole discussion goes completely off the rails when you're talking about anything other than a monitor on a laptop or desktop computer. This is because different use-cases will dramatically bias the decision of which theme is best depending on how and where you use the device. For examples: Dark mode is MUCH harder to read when used with a projector, but it actually helps extend battery life on my phone. Dark mode is also less jarring on my smart TV when navigating in and out of videos and movies at night.
IMO, just use what you want to use, and don't worry too much about which theme saves you a few milliseconds of response time or reduces eye-strain by some infinitesimal amount. Nobody is going blind because of their choice of theme. Nobody is suddenly 10% faster at coding. "Dark mode vs. Light mode" is almost entirely an aesthetic choice.
Dark mode is inherently lower contrast, and most displays perform worse on dark content.
Plus, some of us like to be outside. With bright sunlit ambient light (not even necessarily direct), dark mode content is practically invisible (just a black screen).
That was really funny. "Do you like chocolate? Well, according to multiple studies, you don't apparently."
How can a study tell me what is comfortable for me? Are we going crazy? We are starting to treat studies like little gods which tell us what to do, and apparently, what to like.
Unless you are an emigre from Betelgeuse or a particularly intelligent octopus, you have eyes that work in the same way as everyone else's eyes. The biology and physiology of the human eye are well understood. Chocolate is an excellent comparison. Whether you like chocolate is a matter of taste. But you don't get to claim that eating chocolate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner is optimal because you prefer it.
Seriously, eye doctors are always interested in how I am even able to see. Which I wasn't at some time, until that got fixed by a brilliant professor.
So, despite the studies, for me white over black is easier to read. Maybe my performance is bad by using white over black. But it would be even worse with black over white, as I would spend all the time squinting at the screen.
So I think conclusion such as "people think they prefer it, but actually, information retention is much higher with white background" is quite applicable despite you thinking that's not true.
I thought this was a myth. I looked into it last year and found that power consumption was (roughly) proportional to brightness.
At a meta-level, I'm surprised that something with so factual (and testable) an answer can still not be settled.
According to this article there is a difference (between grey and black), but it is very small?
But if you looked at the pure white with polarized sunglasses, you could see the image! The pixels don't turn on and off, they just change polarization. And there's a thin layer that blocks light of one polarization, but not the other.
EDIT: Wikipedia has a picture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display#/media/...
CRT - Black didn't light up the pixels (I don't remember the details as to how), so it did reduce power usage some.
LCD - Had a constant backlight (see sibling comment for details), so there was little to no difference between black and anything else.
OLED/AMOLED - Black LEDs are actually turned off, instead of displaying a dark color, so we're back to it saving power - more even than CRTs did.
Just a detail that isn't quite right in the article: black is actually the highest power state for LCDs. The backlight draws the same power all the time (for a given brightness setting) but the pixels draw more power when they are black.
It is absolutely settled, and has been tested over and over again. Power is roughly proportional to the amount of light emitted[1], so having dark grey is absolutely a power savings over pure white.
Google slides: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/8/18076502/google-dark-mode... Display energy modeling: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1002/stvr.1635
[1]: This isn't totally true mostly because the display is broken into RGB elements emitting light of differing efficiencies and human perception of the brightness of those elements is not identical.
I hate these obviously one sided arguments. Here they could have said to not use a flashlight while hiding in the dark. But they tactfully left that out.
Yes.
>Many people quote light mode as being a contributory factor to eye strain. Based on the reading I’ve done, this doesn’t appear to be true.
I'll test that now.
- Blindy migraine mode: Hurts.
- Dark mode: Doesn't hurt.
- Different result ever? No.
The above is from the undisputed, worldwide expert on what I feel.
- stupid dark mode: makes me cranky, gives me a headache - light mode: relaxed reading, makes me feel comfortable. - different results ever? No.
the above is from the undisputed, worldwide export on what I feel.
The only conclusion I can can draw from this is that it's going to differ for difference people, and options are good.
OTOH I know people who tried it and hated it. Just because I like it doesn't mean you have to like it. I think it's awesome to have choices.
I grew with Hercules Monochrome monitors (green on black), and that's always been a comfortable color scheme for me.
In my Turbo Pascal days, I began to have an affinity for white text over blue backgrounds.
I believe it was during the days of Windows 3.0 (1990) was when white backgrounds became the norm, and we've been stuck with that for over 3 decades. Not even the early X Windows programs had white backgrounds -- Mosaic and Netscape had grey backgrounds and muted chrome.
I think dark backgrounds evoke nostalgia (at least among some of us).
I'm still running black text on light grey as my primary colour scheme for text editing since AmigaDOS 2.0 in the 90s. Seriously.
First I found I read my kindle more than physical books even though I prefer the look and feel of physical books. Then I found I read even more on my ipad with the kindle app showing white text on a black background.
Find what works for you. Or if you are a UX designer, provide options.
I think the better advice is, customize your environment for your comfort.
Often the reason why people use dark mode is that they use their devices in badly lit environments. It's not a good idea to stare into a bright monitor in a dark room, and the dark mode is arguably the wrong fix for the problem. Reading in dimly lit rooms is known to cause headaches and eye strain and should generally be avoided.
If someone really needs to work in a dark environment tools like flux/redshift are a better solution.
I don't really want to customize things multiple times daily. And if I have to pick, it will be dark, because it's easier on the eyes when the sun goes down and I dim the lights in anticipation of going to bed.
Modern monitors do have this. Not sure for how many years, but the one I'm currently seated by is 3 years old and has auto dimming.
If you’re reading something purely reflective like paper, sure. If you’re reading a screen that is shooting rays of light directly into your eyeballs though?
Dimly lit room + brightly lit cube means that whenever your vision tracks outside of the cube it will have to adjust the opening of the iris. Doing this a lot will tire your eyes out. My interpretation of this is that we should try to have about the same light level across our work spaces and that this should be a mean between long term comfort and readability. I think most of us could probably benefit from larger font sizes as well which feel easier to read in lower light to me.
I even block natural light using sunglasses when I go outside!
Once upon a time I stared at the Sun for a solid 20 seconds without blinking. I couldn't read text for a month, the letters disappeared from under my center vision. Why in God's name would I want to routinely stare at a bright screen?
I've found that when reading articles or text I like dark text on a white background. So news apps are kept in light mode.
For development i like that darker themes allows me to see the syntax highlighting better. Plus my partner loves the "rainbow text" and knows when I'm working "matrix time" :)
I love this. My wife calls it "the black screens"
Same, but a problem nowadays is that if you have your OS in dark mode, some site designers detect this and serve you up dark CSS :-(
> On the flip side, long-term reading in light mode may be associated with myopia.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28904-x
I now use this as my triple-click functionality since it is more universal than inverting colors (which can cause issues on some websites, with photos, etc.).
When I got my current Android phone (a year and a half ago), I was so confused as to why my screen got a blue hue at night. After finding out what it was, I figure it would be good to leave on, and I even set it up on my Ubuntu machine. Holy cow do I depend on it now. If I look at a screen late in the day without a blue light filter, I notice a serious difference. I don't know if I've just gotten used to the blue light filter, or if it really is helpful, but I've become a dedicated fan.
So when I hear some fanboy about dark mode this and dark mode that I roll my eyes and try to ignore it until shoves it in my eyes with his "I know better" attitude. At which point I kindly remind him that I don't go in his house and rearrange furniture to my liking and better change the subject
Let's say you users draw diagrams with SVG and the background defaults to white. You make a dark mode. You can't easily fix the SVG. You can't just set the background to black. The SVG's dark colors won't be readable. You can't just set the dark colors to light colors as you have no idea what the diagram is trying to show. The best you can do is set all images to have a white background so any image with transparency is shown in the default but then you end up with large white rectangles on an otherwise dark page which is jarring.
I actually mostly like dark mode. My editors have used dark colors since the 80s. My terminal has been set to a dark color for as long as I can remember on any OS. But, maybe because of bad color choices, I can't focus on stackoverflow's dark mode at all. Maybe it's the blue on dark gray they picked. I don't know what it is but I can't read it.
solarized light, redshift and just turn screen brightness down and it actually still looks ugly to me, but regarding eye strain, having proper syntax highlighting, and being less annoyed about the things mentioned above, it is fine and I might stick to this setup; once you are focusing you don't notice the ugliness.
https://i.imgur.com/xakys4y.png
reminded me of ACME, so I guess rob was just spot on way back https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Acme.png
But what what I wanted to say: I changed my i3 colors to solarized light (vim status bar as well), can have a look here: https://i.imgur.com/B4EaE4l.png
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
Also, there's been conflicting research if blue light is actually harmful
It's really jarring when spending hours inside these apps and jump to a file browser or web browser and get blasted with light.
The effect is worse the higher the contrast between dark background and bright text and the longer I've been reading. Anyone else have this problem?
My worst experience was with jsFiddle. They switched to darkmode only, which ended my use of the site for a long time. I just recently found this GreaseMonkey script https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/403402-jsfiddle-light-them... that puts jsFiddle back to light mode.
I've tried dark mode a few times in the past because I felt like that's what you should use to code. But I simply don't like looking directly at bright text.
In myopia the eye grows too long, generating poorly focused retinal images when people try to look at a distance. Myopia is tightly linked to the educational status and is on the rise worldwide. It is still not clear which kind of visual experience stimulates eye growth in children and students when they study. We propose a new and perhaps unexpected reason. Work in animal models has shown that selective activation of ON or OFF pathways has also selective effects on eye growth. This is likely to be true also in humans. Using custom-developed software to process video frames of the visual environment in realtime we quantified relative ON and OFF stimulus strengths. We found that ON and OFF inputs were largely balanced in natural environments. However, black text on white paper heavily overstimulated retinal OFF pathways. Conversely, white text on black paper overstimulated ON pathways. Using optical coherence tomography (OCT) in young human subjects, we found that the choroid, the heavily perfused layer behind the retina in the eye, becomes about 16 µm thinner in only one hour when subjects read black text on white background but about 10 µm thicker when they read white text from black background. Studies both in animal models and in humans have shown that thinner choroids are associated with myopia development and thicker choroids with myopia inhibition. Therefore, reading white text from a black screen or tablet may be a way to inhibit myopia, while conventional black text on white background may stimulate myopia.
Most importantly: paper doesn't emit light. Now that I'm behind a massive QHD screen, that thing is shining a lot of light in my face. Even more than the 20" Unix Workstations I used in university. I actually like it a bit darker than all this light. In fact, when a site has a transparent dark layer over its text because it wants me to respond to a popup first, I often prefer to read through that darker overlay. Screens are often too bright.
The primary reason I'm using light mode, is that it's the default everywhere and I'm used to it. Youtube in dark mode is confusing, but Discord in dark mode is fine. I haven't tried most websites in dark mode.
My phone and my laptop actually do have AMOLED screens, so dark mode would save power in my case. Just not on the big screen I'm currently using.
I don't understand those who prefer Dark mode, but hey, if that's what you like, and it works for you, I'm all for having that choice on every program. Not all eyes are equal.
Although I read somewhere that weather Dark or Light background is better depends a lot on your environment. If you are in a very bright environment, next to big windows or intense artificial light, then Light is better. If you are in a darker environment then Dark is better. This matches my experience.
What I think it's definitely bad is constantly switching between Dark and Light. If I do that I get a headache very quickly. This makes Dark specially bad for me because even if I code in a Dark IDE, if I switch to the browser, the majority of websites use Light mode. And this switch causes me pain.
"... the answer is simple: test 5 users in a usability study. Testing with 5 people lets you find almost as many usability problems as you'd find using many more test participants."
Oh wait, but my site has millions of users!
"Doesn't matter for the sample size, even if you were doing statistics."
Even if you were doing statistics? What does it even mean lol... it just sounds to me they want to justify whatever "studies" they've have in their library. I'd say, unless a Nielsen study is replicated and double checked, probably (pun intended :-p) their studies shouldn't be taken very seriously.
This being the key point they're making:
> The main argument for small tests is simply return on investment: testing costs increase with each additional study participant, yet the number of findings quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns. There's little additional benefit to running more than 5 people through the same study; ROI drops like a stone with a bigger N.
This doesn't quantify the scale of the reported problems. It goes into it with the assumption that you simply want to find as many of the problems with your site as possible.
> Even if you were doing statistics?
The sentence you quoted regarding this makes the point that the number of users the site has is not the factor that should drive the size of your panel (you'll note that elsewhere the article argues that where you need statistically significant results you need at least 20 users and more if you need tight confidence intervals). Rather the size of your panel should be determined by your required confidence intervals, and when identifying usability issues is your main concern they don't need to be tight.
Back when users were still allowed to make decisions, I usually changed the background in Windows text controls from white to a light, warm gray.
Up to a point, people work better with more dopamine in their brains. (Many people have subclinical/undiagnosed ADHD, and work especially better with more dopamine in their brains.) One way to make people's brains produce more dopamine is to make them stare directly into bright light sources. Therefore, light-mode is very likely to be observed as "more productive" for anyone who's not already saturating their dopamine receptors by other means (drugs et al.)
-----
Fun tangent that I like to bring up, because few people seem to have heard of it:
This dopamine agonism in the SCN also increases muscle tone in muscles with nerve connections afferent to the SCN, e.g. the orbital muscles of the eye (chemical "feedback" through the optic nerve, essentially.)
The current hypothesis for the development of myopia (nearsightedness) is that the eye's orbital muscles must receive a certain amount of dopamine during the development/growth of the skull to keep the eye pressed into the right shape relative to the ocular orbit. In people who don't get enough bright-light exposure to consistently trigger dopamine release from the SCN, their orbital muscles remain slack, allowing their eye to "relax" wider into the orbit, leading to the retina growing into position further away from the cornea, and thus leading to myopia.
This means that children don't get nearsighted from doing "close work" all day; but they do become nearsighted from staying inside all day, where they aren't getting enough SCN stimulation from the lower indoor light levels. The likely "fix" for the epidemic of nearsightedness is to get kids to do even sedentary activities outside. (And for people who live in places where it's cloudy/raining most of the year, to get indoor lighting equivalent in light output to a light-therapy lamp.)
If 30 minute+ light-therapy made you manic so would working a field in summer, a hundred times over. Outside of drugs and illness there is little one can do to escape even short-term homeostasis. Nothing is linear and everything has feedback limiting it.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3819153/#!po=50...
Look at 70's terminals and 80's DOS computers. Notice how they are green on black, light gray on black or amber on black: dark mode.
Look at code editors from the 90s or early 2000s. They allowed choosing color schemes, many of which were light text on dark background.
Look at websites from the 90s and mid 2000s: there was still some diversity in design back then, some allowed switching CSS color schemes by the user.
Look at Windows 3.11, Windows 98, XP, etc...: allowed changing all the colors of everything (no clue how the situation in Windows 10 is).
Android also has been having white text on black in various iterations of early to recent versions, especially for OLED screens.
Etc...
For example, at night, sitting in a low-lit living room, I can set the brightness to 20% and comfortably read articles where the text is black on a white background. But if I then switch to a "dark mode" app that has white text on a black/gray background, I need to bump the brightness up to 30-40% for it to be comfortable.
I'm not sure what the solution is, or even what the "scientific" explanation is. Isn't the contrast exactly the same?
Surely this is not an uncommon problem?
When I want to do some light reading in bed at night (I do have a blue light filter on for that), I will often abandon even trying to read pages with white backgrounds because it is quite uncomfortable.
I do not care if scientifically I read three words less per minute, this is about perception. A dark mode option on a site shows me the developer cares to cover my use case and makes me more likely to go back.
If you need to do a light theme only, then just the HN reddish-tint on the background helps me a lot.
At the end of the day the idea is to minimize brightness to:
-Save energy -Reduce Eye Strain -Reduce blue light emission
However, there is lots of research suggesting, that Dark Mode is more of a placebo than it actually works. There is already a set of new display technologies being developed that have the benefits of "Dark Mode" without the need of extra software, namley E-Paper technology and RLCD. Those are having several advantages over "old" Display technologies: https://imgur.com/a/oPhIu6A
Dark mode, blue light blocking glasses, etc. are just part of a bigger trend nameley the shrinking backlight industry in the display industry.
There are some intersting players developing backlight free screens already and in 5-10 years it will be the standard. Also in terms of screen economics, not even mentioning the material and energy savings.
The thing is, that our body/eye has been trained for thousands of years to work with reflective light (to see things/objects through the light reflection of the sun). The screen trend to look directly into backlight over the past decades is very unnatural to our body/vision and caused many problems. We need a screen technology that is very aligned with on how our body is designed and works.
Big players in the display market are realizing this and building alternatives. Big players include Sharp, Lenovo, BOE Technologies, JDI, Flex Lightning, Hisense, ONYX, Dasung etc.
You can read about screen alternatives (like eink and rlcd) here: https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/h179j5/new_eink_alter...
PS: There was recently aready a Tablet released with the new RLCD screen technolgoy by BOE-Technologies, check here: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/11/tablet-with-high-refresh-r...
Anything you do for thousands of hours yearly should definitely be optimized.
That article mentions a study suggesting that light-mode screen viewing can contribute to myopia. I was very surprised by this. The study is here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28904-x
I also found a few things that make me want to consider the findings seriously. The authors are well-known; Schaeffer (corresponding) has an h-index of 50. The study is also cited by a review on myopia from 2019, which notes (original study is [112]):
>A recent hypothesis is that the problem may be associated with the predominant use of black text on white background [112]. This hypothesis proposes that the problem lies in the balance of stimulation of ON and OFF visual pathways, with natural scenes leading to balanced stimulation, with black text on white heavily overstimulating OFF pathways. Given that ON-bipolar pathways stimulate release of dopamine from amacrine cells [113], and dopamine agonists can inhibit axial elongation in animal models [114, 115], this is a promising link.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-8491-2_...
Ironically, I think I'll be switching devices to dark mode a lot more having found this blog post. But as with any new scientific hypothesis, this one will probably evolve over the coming years.
White over black is terrible contrast. Black over white is the best contrast (the whole reason it became the norm).
I turn light themes everywhere and the difference to my eyes is tremendous -- especially when leaving screens for the day (no blurry vision).
This is absurd. You know what's EASIEST to see? A shining light bulb against a background of darkness.
I am skeptical about this suggestion of evolutionary reasons to explain computer screen settings. Obviously any vision task is influenced by our evolutionary history, but we did not evolve to read text at all.
Independent of that, there are at least two parameters that I can control, usually much more easily than light/dark. I can adjust text size, per application, and I can adjust screen brightness, per machine. These things allow fine control of 1) ease of reading, 2) total light output. Any study that considers the binary light/dark setting and ignores anything more fine-grained is completely missing the point.
The point of research like this is to show what should be the default. The default should definitely still be black on white. Dark mode should only be an option.
For me dark mode completely misses the point when it comes to eye strain anyway. For more than ten years now I've been using a low contrast colour scheme. It happens to be light on dark, but it's far from white on black (it's called Zenburn). I use this for emacs as well as terminals, which is where 90% of my work is done. I use "dark mode" plugins for Firefox simply because it reduces the contrast between the web and my work
I'm currently using 4800K. The reason is twofold;
1. my screen now better blends in into the surrounding light and therefore feels more natural to look at and
2. in order to preserve my ability to see blue light. Research has shown (can't find it now, but it seems reasonable) that when you look too much to screens, the ability to see blue light becomes less as your brain tries to compensate for the amount of blue light, in order to give a more natural view of the screen.
Next to that, I'm putting the brightness of my MacBook and monitor that much lower, so it's about the same brightness as the surroundings. Meaning, brighter when I'm outside or the sun shines brightly in my room, darker when it's darker out- or inside.
For example Youtube and Twitch where the main content is in video format, dark mode is excellent - just like how the lights turn off in theatres.
Now when it comes to typing, in a Markdown app for example, a white background and black font feels more natural - just like a good old piece of paper.
Really frustrating.
If I set my city manually then it works.
I'm one of those morning people, who works best from 5:00 AM to around noon. I like white backgrounds and black text, with lots of contrast. Anything else is just harder to read, and contributes to eye strain. These new dark UIs, and also flat UIs in general are just harder for me to read and harder to identify and separate the components, so I try to avoid them when I can. The Windows 10 UI is a particularly egregious example. The sun deck on my farm is my ideal development environment.
However, I can imagine that someone who generally works in a dark environment would prefer a dark background so as not to blast their eyes with light.
It does matter a lot.Entire marketing strategies are based om when is the best time to post things on SM platforms.
Thanks whoever started dark mode trend
So byebye anecdotal eye floater guy who supports dark mode.
It does not come up that way for me. I'm on OSX with appearance set to dark. (Firefox 77.0.1)
Is there something I'm doing wrong? YC is a light theme too.
It’s jolly handy if you want to use your screen at night without waking the wife. Other than that, I don’t find much to recommend it.
Some readers, particularly those who are older, have a large number of "eye floaters", fibers that float in the vitreous of the eye. Illuminated black on white printing exposes these far more readily to the reader, making reading more challenging and chaotic.
It's one of the sad sides of tech: we have all this knowledge about accessibility and this is either siloed or just not talked about. Designers are learning about aesthetics, color theory, typography but not about making your product support as many humans as possible - which is a business outcome!
We don't listen to our music at 90+% volume always (and then complain that we need amute mode). That would be absurd since there is a volume control that can be used to set the sound output to a level that's just enough louder than the ambient noise level that we can hear as much detail of the music as we like.
For displays, we have brightness control which serves the same purpose.
With proper brightness adjustment, light mode can and should be very comfortable and natural in all but extremely dark environments.
I kind of got a little frustrated by the whole buzz around dark mode interfaces knowing that I wouldn't get any benefit out of it. I'm also annoyed by Steam (and others) for not providing a native light mode - it really is an accessibility issue for some of us.
I hope the hype around dark mode won't lead to neglect or worse a complete absence (steam) of a light mode.
Perhaps it's just the historical nature of coding on older displays that couldn't render white on black well, however I suspect that has more to do with syntax highlighting.
Colors show up much better against a black background, which probably helps in visually recognizing syntax forms via clearer colors. The only time I've used light mode while coding is when coding outdoors, where dark mode is simply too dark for the ambient environment.
Surely the use of Dark Mode is purely on ascetic grounds.
Is anyone really justifying that choice by claiming it’s “easier to read”?
This reads like a massive straw man argument.
Maybe I prefer it because of retro-cool-nostalgia, but most of the time it just feels less stressful.
Dark mode also seems to be superior for phones and smartwatches in dark environments. One of these days I want to try red-on-black for reading and writing in a darkened room, as red light seems better for not interfering with night vision.
When you have the same font weight, the white on black approach tend to make people feel the stroke looks thinner and more blurry.
If you are curious you can switch to black on white, then adjust the font weight to the thinnest until you feel it starts to be blurry. When switch back to white on black it would be more blurry to you.
But anyway it boils down to preference since people can adjust the font to compensate if it is blurry to them.
> This result seems to suggest that, even though performance in light mode may be better in the short term, there may be a long-term cost associated with it.
So, don't start switching all your terminals and IDEs to light mode just yet. Also, this is just one study. Curious if there are more.
As other posters said and I am just going to repeat: the scientists can pull as many studies as they like. I find dark mode to be objectively better for me. It doesn't strain my eyes and is much more readable and quick to consume the content in 99% of the time -- there are rare exceptions but they are just that, rare exceptions.
Not sure how useful such an article is. It still reads like an opinion piece.
Outside on the balcony? Xterm/vim with white background. 11pm in the livingroom? Xterm/vim with dark background.
I usually have a browser open when I'm coding, so being able to invert the colours is useful for me. If dark mode isn't dark enough, I wrote a Qt script to overlay 50% black overtop of all screens. Does anyone do this to preserve battery life?
I prefer Dark Mode for certain tasks and in certain environments (lighting conditions, etc.), while I prefer Light Mode for other tasks and in other environments.
Moreover, I've experienced times where both modes have caused fatigue of some sort.
Thus, I'm skeptical whether an argument can be made for one mode over the other in all situations.
For me there is too much risk of that with dark mode. The white background already gives me all the light I need so my eyes adjust and any colors can be used.
I would recommend a light gray background for the least strain on the eyes.
I wish I, as a lazy developer, had to do the least amount of work to make the most amount of users use my software, the quality of their experience be darned.
Electron gets me through most of the way. For the rest I have to write articles to convince people about the unnecessity of anything that makes me do extra work.
If someone could write a tool to automate such articles that would be great.
1. eye floaters: I keep noticing them with light backgrounds 2. poor office environment: with too much sunlight entering the windows, I have to boost screen brightness, which nukes my retina unless I use dark mode 3. poor screen: I have a Samsung UHD screen in which it is almost impossible to lower the brightness, dark mode is a relief
That seems like an explanation of why to prefer dark mode over light mode when those are the choices available. Or are app/web developers making dark mode versions that actually use bright blue light?
I can use my phone in bed at night without the brightness being crazy. Case closed.
Also, it looks cooler, especially since my phone has an OLED display (which should also mean lower battery consumption). Case closed even further.
In the day perhaps. But a guy holding a flashlight at night is pretty damn visible.
Article doesn't cover it specifically, but I'd be interested to see how people perceive the ease of dark mode on OLED vs "dark mode" on LED.
I'm now almost certain 8-10 daily hours of reading code in dark mode contributed negatively to my vision.
When we tried showing our dataViz in light-mode..it failed miserably.
However we may consider adding an *optional light-mode for the rest of the dashboard screens.
(SCNR)
There is a perfectly good brightness slider on my phone. If the white text is too bright, I can adjust it.
Also, I paid extra for a monitor / phone with a decent contrast ratio. Why won’t the internet let me have nice things?
BTW, other ideas are welcomed. Hate abandoning perfectly functional tech.
I prefer the option of having dark/dim modes when I have a migraine (yes, I shouldn't be using a computer then but sometimes you need to).
So what? It's personal preference. A few studies aren't going to affect how most people rationalise it to themselves, because, who cares?
I prefer sepia background for reader mode and ebooks. Night themes always for text editors.
It also matters a lot on when the room is brightly lit or not.
Light mode lights up the bedroom and disturbs my partner while dark mode does not.
Maybe only if you mess with your about:config, haven't found a way to enable that in GUI.
1) That points of light spread in your retina, while "points of dark" (absence of light) do not.
For this reason, light text on a dark background (dark mode) "bleeds" in your retina, which depending on your vision, becomes blurry and less in-focus, and letterforms begin to run into and merge with each other. This decreases legibility. Squinting reduces the amount of light, and is a common response to increase focus. Squinting is a cause of eyestrain. Turning down the brightness helps but may cause the text to be too dim, by the point where bleed is insignificant.
Dark text on a light background (light mode), on the other hand, has surrounding light bleed into it. This reduces contrast a little bit, but because modern screens already have so much contrast (and black-on-white is usually too high contrast anyways), but legibility remains ideal and there's no eyestrain due to focus problems.
2) That for dark text on a light background (light mode), an overly bright screen relative to the surroundings may cause eyestrain, as you squint to compensate. The maximum brightness on your screen is often too bright unless you're in a super sunny room. To correct this, hold a piece of white office paper next to your screen, and reduce brightness until the screen matches. (If you're watching movies or something, however, you'll probably want maximum brightness.)
3) That lots of light, apparently blue light, before bedtime, can work against you falling asleep.
What's this all add up to?
Well, if you're young with amazing eyesight, you might be able to do whatever you want, but you'll have an easier time if you don't keep things at maximum brightness when working, no matter which mode you're using.
And if it's close to bed then either f.lux or Night Shift are a good idea, with a dim screen if using light mode, or a not-too-bright screen if using dark mode.
But that for normal work during the day, if you have fairly average or worse vision? Light mode absolutely wins the day in terms of eyestrain and legibility, as long as your screen is kept to the brightness of a white piece of paper, and not more.
But if you just like the aesthetics of dark mode and you don't get eyestrain or headaches from any squinting? Then go ahead. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that long-term squinting causes any long-term vision deterioration. But as you get older, you may find yourself needing to switch back to light mode one day.
Here is one from me:
I am focusing my sight like I would be trying to pick berries in the forest. While between trees it is dark and berries are dark, as gatherers we were collecting berries, we should read black text on dark background.
Large white screens are overwhelming for me. For me it is better to have dark screen and bright spots to focus on. It helps with development to focus on specific lines instead of trying to get whole screen at once.
My wife always puts our TV in a very dim setting and complains about headache when I set it to max brightness. But I really get tired after watching a dim screen for 10+ min. I have aspherical lenses (different spherical radius in x vs y direction), not sure what the correct term is.
I don’t think this is a good example. He is missing one important factor, which is lighting.
There is a back-light on screen, which make light colors pop out of the dark background.
While at night, since it’s in a low-light environment, our eyes can’t really see the colors.
I’m done reading!
I even had to install a Firefox plugin to disable dark colors, to make website that use it readable again.
Personally, I was never into dark mode so this article feels vindicating; nor bacon, for that matter. I think I just committed several incidents of e-blasphemy.
Late nights i just reduce the overall screen brightness.
My migraines and headaches from light sensitivity tell me you’re wrong
The screen uses energy to emit light. The less light it has to emit, the less energy it needs. The longer your battery lasts.
* Dark mode is truly black (not dark grey) and
* You use OLED or AMOLED screens.
But when that's the case it can save up to 41% of energy. They then argue, that if dark mode were to be a health detriment, that would be more important than battery charge.
(Note: That's what they argue. There are results that show that power consumtion scales mostly linearly with output brightness. Which would contradict the results in the article.)
Been doing this for years and I wouldn’t go back.
2. Filter blue light
3. Have ambient lighting
4. Your retinas will thank you
My preference is dark text on a parchment (off-white) background. Sort of like HN.
I've "trained" myself to weather uncomfortable stuff many times (for example, the keyboard that I'm using to write this very post is new, and I keep hitting wrong keys. That will stop, soon), so it wasn't just "old boomer no likee dark."