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Comment by jimbobimbo | Hacker News Reader

To me, the biggest issue with dark mode is that it doesn't differentiate between chrome and content.

Dark chrome helps light content pop, reduces distractions. Unfortunately, the moment one turns it (dark chrome) on, the content goes dark too.

Depending on your eyesight, you might be OK. I for one can't look at dark content in light ambient conditions for longer than few minutes without discomfort.

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This is what people quite consistently mess up these days. Go back to the earlier days of æsthetic dark themes¹, which was largely in things with the chrome/content split such as Photoshop, and you see this clearly. The purpose of their æsthetic dark modes with their low contrast and neutral middling-dark colours was to draw attention to the content and minimise chrome distraction.

Of browsers: Firefox defaults to having content matching the browser theme, but does let you change it: Settings → General → Language and Appearance → Web site appearance: Automatic/Light/Dark. (In the distant past, this defaulted to matching the OS theme—which almost always meant “light” on Linux and Windows—and could only be changed via about:config. In Firefox 95, the default was changed to matching the browser theme, in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1529323. In Firefox 100, the preference was finally added to Settings.)

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¹ There are several distinct categories of dark modes, with significantly different characteristics. I recognise four general categories (though there are certainly intermediate states too): æsthetic, accessibility, low-light, and power-saving. I wrote a bit more about each in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28516862. These days, æsthetic is the most common.

FWIW, and as a person who almost always prefers light mode but who’s also invested a fair bit of energy into getting dark modes right, one of the nuances of a good dark mode implementation is that it uses darker areas very similarly to light mode. A generally good light mode and its corresponding generally good dark mode will usually map:

- Base background: white or slightly off white -> a dark enough grey or off-grey for good baseline contrast

- Borders: darker on the grey scale -> dark enough to strongly contrast the base background, or omitted for bordered areas which are already that dark

- Toolbars, window handles, other concrete “chrome” areas: darker than baseline, for both light and dark modes

- Buttons and text: high contrast, dark in light mode, light in dark mode

- Active items: accent color or outline for maximum contrast

- Colors generally: the same hues except when other color perception preferences are chosen (for either mode), but generally a slightly lower saturation for dark mode backgrounds, and hue adjustments for color perception errors in color spaces

All of this in my experience needs a lot of eyeballing but quite a lot could probably be approximated with good perceptual light and color models. But I’ll still prefer light mode most of the time.

> Unfortunately, the moment one turns it on, the content goes dark too

This might be an artifact of your screen's limited contrast. Have you tried dark mode on an OLED screen?

They meant that when you turn on Chrome's dark mode (for the browser UI) it also enables `prefers-color-scheme: dark` for websites. These are always synced as far as I know.

Thank you, I edited in (dark chrome) for clarity.

"Chrome" here refers to windows and widgets surrounding content, not the browser specifically.

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