Dark Mode vs. Light Mode: Which Is Better? | Hacker News Reader

Dark Mode vs. Light Mode: Which Is Better?

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72 pointsseanwilson72 comments

It's not even about preferences for me. I can spend all day in light mode without eyestrain, without issue, very comfortably.

If I encounter a page that's dark mode (GUI), after about a minute or so, I start seeing spots before my eyes that stay with me for quite a while.

To wit... I use these two firefox extensions to convert pages from Dark Mode to Light mode. If one fails, the other usually finds success (I think they work in reverse too):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/site-color-ch...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-color/

side note: I cannot explain why the terminal (FG/White; BG/Black) feels incredibly comfortable to my eyes. Maybe it's the larger font I use (80 columns = ~2/3rds of my 16" screen width), the right amount of contrast, the fixed spacing...?

The theory is cool, but the ending is the practical part - there are system APIs to tell you which one the user prefers, so you can just make users happy and provide both options.

Exactly.

To be fair, both dark mode and light mode are bad. For me, optimal is with some dark grey background that mixes well with the surroundings around the screen. The point is, not to have contrast with surroundings. Kindle, or the text consoles on older CRT monitors looked good because they were not too bright against the surroundings.

And the content on the screen felt like real-world tangible object.

Having said that, I feel that dark mode (full dark) is a product of "new is exciting", "game theme", "dark means serious, mystery, suspense", "no glaring", "linux/console style, so geek", "we are coders, so different from normal people" etc

The reality is, full dark theme requires more brightness and more power consumption. It feels like searching for things in a dark room without light (mystery, suspense factor). Light theme can feel more relaxed, with lower brightness settings.

Yes. For about 15 years now I've been using a low contrast theme everywhere (Zenburn). I find "dark mode" themes annoying because of their contrast. But I do still prefer dark themes over light.

That depends on your monitor. An OLED monitor with its true black and great contrast is ruined with a not quite black background. If it's a #000000 background, you can turn the brightness way down.

I optimize for maximum amount of natural sunlight hitting my retina throughout the day, as that tends to have positive effects on my psychological wellbeing.

So I've set up my desk at a 45° angle bridging a corner of my office where I have windows along one of the walls (with me looking at the corner, of course, not into the room).

So, I'm as close to the windows as possible and have a wall of windows with natural light hitting my eyes from a 45° angle. This is important on overcast days which, where I live, is most of them because otherwise, I would get barely any natural light at all.

With dark mode, this setup runs into trouble on sunny days because sunny spots in the room tend to reflect off the screen, producing glare. This leads me to start drawing blinds and almost always spirals into me sitting in a dark room on the sunniest of days when I most want to enjoy the sun.

With light mode, I can get away with regulating the light through a movable paravent that moves with the sun and takes care of the worst of sunny spots reflecting off my screen and maybe drawing the blinds only partially.

Neither?

If your monitor is so bright that a white rectangle hurts your eyes, you need to turn it down.

On my current monitor I go from 100% brightness during the day to around 20% at night. I change it roughly twice a day.

I don't understand how, even with dark mode, someone could run a modern panel full tilt at 100% through the evening. My brain can sense the intense heat of that backlight behind every pixel. I don't even want the possibility of a momentary dark mode glitch to be a concern. It took me a long time to appreciate the harm of not controlling this stuff.

For me 100% brightness is way too much when inside even during the day. Maybe the monitors I have are exceptionally bright to start with, which I doubt, but whenever I get new monitors I usually put them down to about 30-40% for usage during the day. Which is the level which to me makes it looks as if white on the screen roughly matches a white wall in a similar location in the room. This just feels the most natural and least fatiguing, probably because looking at the screen or surroundings hardly changes pupil size. Which I confirmed with a research-grade eyetracker.

> If your monitor is so bright that a white rectangle hurts your eyes, you need to turn it down.

Can’t turn down the minimum brightness.

People using dark mode do not use 100% brightness.

Not sure how to express this, but this concept that the color scheme of an app|website is supposed to be a "feature", bothers me to no end.

Color schemes were always supposed to be infinitely configurable by the user, not something a third party can control and dicatate. There used to be no concept of dark or light "mode", every person configured their UI colors as they wished. Want green on pink mode? No problem, just configure it.

(But to answer the question, definitely "light mode" for me. A predominantly dark screen brings on a headache quickly.)

> Color schemes were always supposed to be infinitely configurable by the user

This was true when we had powerful computers (Apollo) with plenty of RAM (4MB) running complex multitasking distributed systems. On today's hardware, such things are impossible. /s

Windows supported them for two decades, from 386 to DDR3 machines

Dark mode after sunset, light mode after sunrise, obviously. Just as nature intended.

This but with a bit more flexibility depending on the state of ambient light. On a gloomy winter day at 51°N I often want dark mode all day.

But not all of us are working in the open air office... Brightly lit office after 5pm in winter (ie after sunset) doesn't mean dark mode is the best option.

Then you switch?

My entire OS, most apps and 90% of websites switch automatically with a single keyboard shortcut.

90% of websites have built-in keyboard shortcuts for switching theme? We must visit different wevsites.

I use an extension for that.

No, you change your OS preference and then most websites that are coded correctly will follow. I do it by sunrise and sunset but have a key binding to override it.

The article didn’t go into this, but I suspect that a large part of the dark mode trend is due to evening/night computer use. If you don’t light your room, the screen is the only light source which is unpleasant.

After several lifetimes of intentionally exposing myself to black/colored text on white, I switched to dark mode last week and haven't looked back.

With such an extensive time study, highly unlikely to be usurped any time soon, and the result being quite the opposite of what I set out to prove, we can all safely put this debate to rest.

A contributing factor is my keratoconus has had some kind of remission. Which is a good thing. At one point I had so many focal points in both eyes, without corrective lenses and before surgery, more than a dozen overlapping versions of text produced unreadable spaghetti. Unless it was a very tiny font from a distance, and then the glyphs only partially occluded each other, and I could I decode them.

Looking at one of those small bright electronics power LED dots across a dark room, I could see all my focal points in each eye, and focal webs meandering between them.

So I feel quite privileged to be able to use dark mode with unaided eyes now.

I'm I the only one who gets headaches after some time with light mode?

Edit: I underwent LASIK eye surgery, and I don't recall experiencing headaches beforehand. Or maybe, just getting old?

I’ve always been quite sensitive to bright screens and get headaches from eye strain too. Dark mode has made a huge difference to me.

I’m just happy that the mode switch is well supported across OSes and browsers nowadays, though it does add some complexity to theming web apps.

Staring at a bright light makes floaters visible, so dark is a must for me. Plus, code should never be dark-on-light, that's disgusting.

Astigmatism can cause eye strain headaches. I don't know if LASIK corrects that or not, or if you have it, but getting glasses with cylindrical correction helped reduce some of my headaches. Apparently most people don't see a big starburst around lights at night, or have a faint/fuzzy halo around text at any distance.

The fundamental mechanism seems to be that light mode causes pupils to contract by exposing the eye to more light. This decreases spherical aberration and increases depth of field just as using as smaller aperture on a camera lens does.

Staring into a light source that contrasts enough with the ambient light to contract my pupils is uncomfortable. I don't want to do that even if it makes me read faster.

I think like in modern pharmacology we will find that there does not exist a prescriptive best for everyone because everyone is genuinely different. We may be able to identify a "best available" for the most common cohorts, but ultimately what works best for an individual will be specific to their unique circumstances.

Eg from physical differences or other issues with their eyes, differences in the way their brains process vision information, to nothing more than cultural habits (it's what they're used to).

These differences show up knowingly or not as preference towards either dark or light mode or something in-between.

So it's reasonable to default to eg light mode since that might be suitable for the largest cohort, but ideally it's best to have the option to switch to dark for those that prefer it.

Does anyone have an idea why we didn't see any dark mode books while dark mode turned out to be quite popular for screens?

Historically, printing black text on white paper was presumably technically easier or cheaper, but I doubt this makes much difference for modern printing of the last fifty years or so.

Edit:

Thinking about it, it's clear that dark mode is most pleasant in dark environments, because it reduces the contrast between the screen and the environment. However, books, being reflective rather than emissive, don't work in dark environments at all. Which defeats the main use case of dark mode.

Moreover, since books are reflective, there is no risk that they get brighter than the environment, while this risk exists with light mode on screens with a brightness level set too high.

Because books don't emit light straight into our eyes.

If you have never tried reading a book under direct midday sunlight, you should try it sometime. It's quite unpleasant.

> Because books don't emit light straight into our eyes.

That doesn't make a difference as long as the light has the same brightness.

> If you have never tried reading a book under direct midday sunlight, you should try it sometime. It's quite unpleasant.

Despite the fact that books don't emit light straight into our eyes? And apart from this, wouldn't that mean we need in fact dark mode books? So why don't they exist?

I like light mode with lower screen brightness.

Likewise. I think I set the brightness to roughly match that of white paper in the room.

Thinking about it, your eyes, not using a monitor, will adjust naturally be be ok with seeing light to dark objects around you so it makes sense for the screen brightness to be in that range. I think probably people who get headaches from white screens have it brighter than that range. I mean people don't generally get issues from white paint on walls and the like.

Dark mode on all LED screens, with blue light filter, at low brightness.

Dark mode at high brightness and light mode at any brightness on LED screens both give me migraines.

That said, light mode on non-emissive (e-ink, actual paper) is find.

I used to be this way then I developed astigmatism. Now the bright text with black background makes it harder to see due to the lower ambient light

I use dark mode unless there is glare coming in. So on foggy or rainy days - dark mode all day. On sunny days - light mode. At night - dark mode.

light mode as the article points out for people with no vision impairment. And the trend towards dark mode in some applications as the default setting is bad.

When people talk about light mode blinding them, please do yourself a favour and do not live like a goblin. Work in a well lit room and calibrate your monitor, your eyes should not be hurting looking at bright colors.

Low density text (most of screen has no content) is easier to read on a black background with bold, light color text. High density text (most of screen has content) is easier to read on a tan background with black text. HN knows what’s up.

Books, websites, email on light background. Code (lots of low density lines with only brackets) on a black background.

orange on black was it in the olden times (except on ASR-33s. q.v. https://www.eetimes.com/feast-your-eyes-on-my-asr-33-teletyp...)

Bloomberg terminals are amber on black.

That was my first computer use - an ASR-33 at school. I remember the old video displays being more green on black.

Light mode forever

why doesn't HN have a dark mode feature?

Funny enough, I use HN as a gentler flashlight when I enter my bedroom after my spouse is asleep as it’s one of the few sites/apps that doesn’t have a dark mode.

Same

There are dozens of us.

And then I keep using it after in bed and then wake them up with my tapping.

Just use dark reader, it works extremely well here.

I use the “HN Dark Mode” add-on set to “auto” so it switches with my OS preferences.

Both on iPhone and Mac.

If you use uBlock Origin, here's how to add automatic dark mode, based on your browser settings (modify "90%" slightly to adjust the contrast):

  ! dark mode
  news.ycombinator.com##html:matches-media((prefers-color-scheme: dark)):style(filter: invert(90%) hue-rotate(180deg))

I have worsening cataracts that I don’t want to get operated on yet, and dark mode is amazing. It’s so annoying when reader mode isn’t available now.

I prefer dark mode if it's have a good color contrast and follow WCAG Standards

I know what you meant, but WCAG2 is actually flawed for dark mode. For gray body text on black, going with the minimum 4.5:1 ratio is hard to read. APCA attempts to fix this https://git.apcacontrast.com/documentation/APCA_in_a_Nutshel....

Neither they both suck. They are both gray on gray. Give my contrast back.

Light mode for me. Dark is just weird, IMO. I don't get more eye strain from light like so many other people do. I also don't wear sunglasses when outside, ever. Maybe I've got strong eyes.

I like light mode and I'm comfortable with dark

Which do you like better? Use that one.

day → light mode ⇒ less eye strain

night → dark mode with high brightness ⇒ less eye strain

What's the science behind this?

Trust me bro.

Common sense? Once you are used to dark mode at night, light mode seems crazy.

I had to implement dark mode in a web app because I was doing a lot development in it at night in a room that was naturally darkened for obvious reasons. Even turning my monitor down to minimal brightness, swapping back to the app from the code editor was absolutely scalding my retinas

led dark, eink light

I hate dark mode, it's just polluting my eyes.

Gray Mode, obviously. /s

Seriously, the best UIs let users adjust things to their preferences instead of forcing one or two-polar-opposite choices.

Letting the use choose is the right answer. I’d go as far as to argue that in some sense, theming is an important accessibility feature because it allows users to adjust UI to meet needs that the developer may not have even known to exist.

Most dark modes suck so much, as they're just "calculated" from whatever theme generator / CSS framework the legions of hell dragged them from.

Dark mode if your screen brightness is way too high. Light mode if it isn't.

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