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>Light background is a must. I never use dark mode on anything.

Dark mode is fundamentally a hack around two things.

First, shitty screens that can't run light mode anywhere near dim enough once the sun goes down (which is at least a 5-nines percentage of all screens ever produced). A good chunk of this is due to insufficient PWM frequency but software has a lot to do with it too- and if I can't make the screen go dark enough, well, then I'll just tell all the pixels to be black and use white text.

Second, shitty flat UI design has made it more difficult to see borders between items. It seems to be easier to pick out a bright glowing spot in a field of black than the reverse- it's worse for comprehension, but not for identification/differentiation. It's easier to see that something is selected when you're using white-on-black, and if you already have a good idea what that something is the comprehension penalty is irrelevant.

Those two things predate most proper dark mode implementations; I assert they created the need for it to exist in the first place.

Bright displays also absolutely fuck up my ability to focus my eyes for the rest of the day, so I attempt to use dark themes on everything, having to accept a light theme for any site or OS feels like a personal failure and reminds me of my almost-useless old eyes.

If you install the 'Dark Reader' browser extension, you can get dark mode on sites that don't have a native dark theme (such as HN!)

> Personally I'm still stuck in this era. Light background is a must. I never use dark mode on anything. I genuinely don't understand the kids...

Kid here (34). My understanding is our generation grew up spending much more time looking at a screen in general. Gaming, socializing, following news, doing work, doing homework, talking to parents, talking to partner(s), reading books, painting, sculpting, paying taxes, managing finances, applying jobs, applying for visas... The list is too long to fit here. Participating in society demands more screen time than ever.

Dark mode makes screens blend with the environment better by emitting light where only needed. Since we can't reduce our screen time without any compromise, we try to optimize with the dials we are left with, in this case, pixel brightness.

My personal theory of display ergonomy is that a light background is better for the eyes because then you have to dial down the screen brightness all the way to a level that's good for reading (generally something close to paper white in the same environment, and usually much lower than the display's maximum brightness).

Admittedly this theory is only backed by personal preference and some vague recollections of CRT-era ergonomics discussion in 1990s UI design books.

> Admittedly this theory is only backed by personal preference

Same for my argument too.

There is also the cultural factor. The age when I was going to make a decision about which high school to choose and what kind of study to pursue, we had the chance to enjoy the release of a few of the best sci-fi movies/shows ever made. Those movies had the black screen, neon green/blue strokes and fonts as the main design language. Looking at the letters falling down in the movie Matrix, it was like "coooool, I wanna be able to type those in real time and make computer do stuff".

Lots of us younger people have dark mode with the screen brightness turned way down. I personally often have my screen brightness at minimum, and on mobile I have Extra Dim turned on for more than half of my usage time.

OTOH reading too low-contrast text is supposed to be bad for the eyes too? (At least that was what parents and educators told me as a kid: “Read at your desk where the light is good or you’ll spoil your eyes!”)

And us older folks have screen brightness turned up as our eyes get worse. For many years I had white background so I could really see things.

Now with floaters I have to use dark background and many games are now unusable as they have light background and medium unreadable text and strain my eyes.

No, it's backed by evidence. Light mode is, objectively, better for your eyes because light characters on a dark background tend to "bloom" and be less clear.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/

I'm in my mid-40s, and I've been looking at screens for many hours on most days for about 38 years. I've preferred a "light mode" colour scheme, with the brightness cranked up ever since I first saw one (an original Mac that a friend's parents bought in the late 80s).

My personal theory is that some people are just genuinely more light-sensitive than others, but that the main factor is which scheme came (back) into fashion during someone's formative years, so it will always be associated with being new and novel to that person.

In matters of taste, I like both light and dark mode equally.

In terms of practicality:

- Dark mode uses less energy and doesn't burn your eyes at night.

- I've only ever found light mode useful when the ambient light is really strong, e.g. direct sunlight shining on my laptop screen. When this happens dark mode is basically impossible to read even with full screen brightness.

So 99.9% of the time dark mode will suit my needs better.

Yes, on an OLED panel dark mode saves energy, but not on, say, an LCD panel

I could be wrong but I think it's only saving power if pixels are actually solid black where the pixel can be turned off entirely. I don't think dark shades are more power efficient than other colors. Thankfully a lot of apps are getting explicitly named OLED dark modes to take advantage of that.

Haven’t thought about that, but it doesn’t sound wrong. Will have to look into that

It would have saved a negligible amount on a CRT monitor of the time, as well.

This is jello casserole for UI.

When Americans first got easy access to refrigeration and food became significantly cheaper, we got jello casserole. People would suspend literally anything in jello because it was so novel at the time. Bright, colorful, wobbly abominations. Just like this UI.

> The reason why so many early 1990s UIs have this kind of color scheme

Do you have any examples? Because from the early 1990s I only remember Windows pre-XP (mostly black and white and blue), AmigaOS (mostly gray, including the newer frameworks like MUI), NeXTStep (gray). Only exception: the colored tabs in OS/2 Warp, if I remember correctly.

SGI Irix is a good case https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX

It is the windows 3.1 aesthetic on much more capable hardware.

Thanks. But I was looking for something like the flash tool shown on the website, or like the default color scheme of Morphic. "Crazy" colored GUI elements etc., not just the background.

Edit: never mind. The link by pavlov has more examples.

SGI IRIX is a pastel-land which I'm very fond of:

http://toastytech.com/guis/irix.html

It's more muted, but follows the principle of "let's use these truecolor hues now that we've got them."

The global fashion trend after 1990 was moving away from bright pure colors and towards increasingly muted pastels. So for examples of more bright-colored UIs on 256-color displays, I think the Mac II / System 6 era would be the place to look. Early CD-ROMs might be a rich vein.

AmigaOS 1.3 and earlier was bright blue, white and a sprinkle of orange.

Windows 1.01 goes hard on the vibrant pastels: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win101

It's a reflection in UIs of Memphis Design, which dominated the 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Group

CDE: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/CDE_Appl...

CDE had different default color schemes from different vendors but most of them were pretty colorful in pastel hues.

For Sun at least it superseded OpenLook, which was mostly grey and a saturated blue background.

I actually liked it better than CDE.