Dark mode is not as good for your eyes as you believe

This, exactly this. Bright white pages are physically painful to me.

>I feel like the web in general has gotten less readable. But this is more to do with font choices, line length and a whole host of other things independent of the dark/light mode.

A few years ago I unticked the setting in Firefox that said "Allow websites to choose their own fonts instead of the ones above" and never looked back.

It's absolutely fantastic how every site now has the same font of my own choosing, it's so legible and clear. Very occasionally a site breaks because it uses icon fonts or they've made their design absolutely pixel perfect, but that's a trade-off I can deal with.

>Surely this isn't a highly subjective topic that is going to result in people hugely advocating for one or the other purely based on their own anecdotes. Right?

No, it's not. Eye physiology is not a la cart.

Individual preference and placebo effects can be, sure. But whether it's good or bad for your eyes is not subjective. Big Mac combos are "subjective" too when it comes to taste, but not subjective when they are compared to a healthy balanced meal.

Turn the monitor brightness down.

I have it set to 5/100 and there's no problem using light mode all day and night.

The point is you want your screen to annoy you so you don’t use it in that time.

> Dark mode is good in the sense that I love it.

I love it so much that I've been using it since my Atari 600 XL and Commodore 64 days.

At times it's been complicated: I remember the early IntelliJ IDEs had no dark-mode but you could configure one yourself (and it was lots of work). Or Windows: the rare time when I worked on Windows I couldn't get a dark mode to work but I remember I could "dim" the laser white background into a light grey and Word would show a slightly grey background.

Linux / Emacs: zero issue configuring these with dark modes of course.

As an anecdote at 51 y/o I need, at long last, to go see an ophthalmologist to measure my now failing eyes.

But spending most of my life from 11 y/o to 51 y/o in front of computer screen, I'd say all these decades without glasses was a good run.

Yeah I'm not using dark mode for any "health" reasons in the first place. It's to avoid pain.

The point though is that while one might "love it" and dark mode might feel like "laser into the eyes" to them, it can also mean reduced eyesight and increased vision problems mid/long term - not "subjectively", but objectively.

To make an analogy, excercize also feels like an exhausting experience for many people, and they "love" and prefer lounging on a couch, but long term they'd live more and be healthier if they did it more of the former and less of the latter.

Then switch on the lights in your room? Why doing complex retheming and suffering pain if you don't when you can just flip the switch?

I have the same problem but its not actually the text that matters but the bright background will constrict your pupils, reducing the amount of lens they use, which reduces the distortion. If I'm in a bright room the mode doesn't matter, but if I'm in a dark room I have to blast the background to constrict those pupils to get a clear image.

That’s a great way to annoy someone else that may already be sleeping in the room.

I thought that’s what everyone did! Apple OSs have a setting to do this at sunset/sunrise or at certain times. I have mine go dark at 10pm and light at 10am.

Same here, I cannot stand looking at dark mode UI in a well lit space. There's not enough contrast. When I work after dark, I'll swap over of course.

You talk about terminals? They talk about websites (or real text made for reading) where their statement is true.

> I tried, but I just can’t believe anything written after that statement. The default was white (or green or orange) on black.

The vast majority of the world's population have rarely or never used a monochrome computer screen. Even when they were common, the bulk of what people read, _even people who used such monitors_, was black on white - it was paper.

Black text on a white background has been the most common on new computers since around the mid-80s.

In the Unix world it became common with the introduction of the X Window System.

In the personal computer world it also became common with the launch of Microsoft Windows 1.0 and Apple Macintosh.

I certainly agree about dark modes being different. I've used vim with black background and white text (and bright colors in the syntax highlighting) for many years now, but whenever I try dark mode in other editors they are mostly shades of grey and completely unreadable. Do people really use dark grey background with a less dark font?

Explicitly specifying “Apple” is almost like not specifying “Apple”? Did you “almost” fail to mention Samsung?

You didn't include the sentence where they call out Samsung explicitly:

> Until recently, most phones were made with LCD screens. The iPhone X was the first Apple phone to launch with an OLED screen. Other phones with OLED displays include the Samsung Galaxy S10 and the Huawei Mate P30. For these phones, dark mode can offer healthy battery saving capabilities.

I don't read that as acting like Apple pioneered anything, but I do read it as assuming that most consumers choose Apple and therefore the moment that Apple included OLED LCDs were no longer "most phones".

Which, while frustrating to someone like me who is tired of Android always being treated as an off-brand afterthought, is reflective of reality in the US.

I had an HTC Desire with AMOLED before the release of Galaxy S. Not saying that was the first one either.

>>> first Apple phone to launch

Becomes "first ... phone to launch". People don't instantly recognize brand names as adjectives. Part of our brains drops them as we read. An options for a writer aiming for clarity would be "Apple's first phone to launch with an OLED", but that doesn't place "Apple" beside "first". Leveraging subtext and association makes for better marketing.

They would almost be writing it like that, if they were making statements without qualification.

But luckily they were not.