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Comment by apparent | Hacker News Reader

I thought this was going to be about how people prefer different levels of blackness for the background in dark mode. I've heard people say that pure black is more battery efficient for OLED displays (but don't know if this is true), and I know some folks prefer a less-inky grey.

I was wondering how there could be six levels though; I'd think 3 or 4 would be the most anyone could notice or care about.

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I do wish there was more conversation around the levels of blackness for dark modes. Black screen and white text is physically painful for me. I usually have to resort to reader mode, or open up dev tools and change colors myself, to make a page like this readable for me.

I appreciate how hard it can be to make a good dark mode; I've spent months building a custom dark theme I term "mid-contrast". It's still WCAG compliant, but easy on my eyes, and I've stuck with the (maybe silly?) requirement of 16 colors only, like Solarized.

Pure black background with pure white elements is a common accessibility issue.

And just curious, why would using "only" 16 colors be silly?

Maybe silly is the wrong word. But sometimes I think I would make things easier on myself if I allowed some shade variants. It's good for me to keep the constraint though.

I've been spending some time creating a Visual Studio theme using this palette and the way that IDE uses colors is... less than great. Trying to find the right token to change is an exercise in madness, and many things that are visually the same in importance/hierarchy use very slightly different shades for some unknown reason.

I'm the opposite. Anything other than pure white on pure black for dark themes gives me eye strain. If you use the dark reader web extension you can adjust the brightness and contrast to your liking.

As it should be - the browser is termed a "user agent" for a reason. There should be browser settings for preferred dark (and light) colour schemes.

Actually - there are to a very small extent. But they are near useless, defining only the colours of uncoloured elements.

I don't like white text on a pure black background either, but for me the solution is to dim the text, not brighten the background. I can't stand the push away from allowing pure black for OLED devices based primarily on Google's design strategy. Though personally I don't want to force my specific preferences on everyone and instead think people should be able to configure it how it suits them best. That's all I want for myself.

there's a firefox (maybe chrome too) extension called dark reader

not only it wil dark-ify pages that don't support dark mode, it will alter the tone of dark mode pages to a more enjoyable (i like to add some pastel colors)

for dark mode pages that are already perfect, you can disable it on a per page basis

only trouble i had so far is that disabling or enabling happens per-site. so I can't have dark mode on google, disabling it on google maps

Seems like "Reader Mode" ought to be the default for a user agent.

The more universal solution would be to standardize Reader Mode compatibility, and for browsers to let users configure how they want Reader Mode to look.

In other words, instead of an n x m solution where every web site has to cater to each different user preference, there should be a simplified content view that every web site only has to support in a singular way, and that allows browsers to cater to the various user preferences.

This likely would have happened already if it weren't for Google's hostility to Reader Mode. It's hilarious to see the Reader Mode that they offer, where it's a resizable 2-column view, to ensure that ads are loaded and kept in sight. We get it, Google: you don't want to endanger your ad revenue.

It's just n x 2 for light and dark themes.

I feel like we could go beyond that, especially for more app-like experiences. Maybe we want themes that do things like "add specific trim to make editable fields more identifiable." or adding "high contrast" versions of the themes for low-quality screens or low-vision users.

There's no reason a webpage shouldn't be as themable as, say, a GTK or Qt based desktop application.

We should be trying to snatch back styling power from the designers and putting it back on the user-agent's side. Let the page look brutalist until the user has chosen an appropriate theme for their needs rather than railroading them into what someone in Marketing decided looked good.

The comment I was responding to was suggesting n x 6. And there are also aspects beyond brightness and contrast, like font styles and sizes, line height and margins, justification and hyperlink style, and so on. The things you can or want to configure in an e-book reader.

Shh, don't tell web designers about reader mode! They'll try to break it!

But wait - Reader Mode messes with our branding, nudges, and calls to action, and breaks my sleek, modern animations and scroll effects.

It is significantly more efficient for oled displays, as off oleds don't use power. It also causes burn in on a smaller part of the display which is usually good (but this could end up being a disadvantage over time as the burn in contrast is higher).

It's also more efficient for led matrix backlights.

Edit: sorry, realized this is misleading: my testing was with light vs dark, not something like dark grey vs 00 black

>I've heard people say that pure black is more battery efficient for OLED displays (but don't know if this is true)

No.

https://www.xda-developers.com/amoled-black-vs-gray-dark-mod...

Did you even read before pasting? Yes technically it is, which would indeed be in line with "levels of dark mode".

Did you? If you read the article you'll find that there's a specific (and quite popular) claim going around that 0% brightness is much more efficient than 1% brightness because pixels can be "fully off". Yes, it's theoretically more efficient, but as per the article it's within the margin of error. For all practical purposes, it's not more efficient.

Grayish dark themes are underrated

for OLEDs, I tend to prefer pure black because it doesn't burn-in. Since they have a limited lifetime, any "on" time is costing me usage in the long-long-long run and I'd rather have my monitor last 5+ years than ... 2 or 3.

>any "on" time is costing me usage in the long-long-long run and I'd rather have my monitor last 5+ years than ... 2 or 3.

Going from dark gray to pure black isn't going to halve your monitor expectancy, if it makes a difference at all. Due to how human perception works something that's merely dark gray is actually orders of magnitude brighter than pure white, or even 50% gray. Therefore most of your burn-in is going to be driven by bright content like photos or white text, not whether you're using 5% gray vs pure black.

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