3 ms·

Agree on the trend thing. Even older research supports the claim that black on white is easier on the eyes, this is why we switched away from white on black (D

Agree on the trend thing. Even older research supports the claim that black on white is easier on the eyes, this is why we switched away from white on black (DOS and UNIX). This applies to screens in well lit environments though, which would explain the rise of the dark mode in recent years: Smartphones in bed. But there it's more about the "less bad" solution. The key part is having a well lit environment, so that the white background of the screen roughly matches the overall brightness of the surroundings. This way the pupils don't have to adjust all the time when looking around your room and then back at your screen, or when looking at code where the screen is mostly black with some text, and then some article with images.

downtide 7y ago
In netscape the default background colour used to be black on light grey. I find that much easier on my eyes than black on white. Even a light yellow with dark green text. But given a dark room I like to switch the other way. See how you feel with a terminal/editor in different colour schemes. So bright room, bright scheme, dark room dark scheme. What I can't stand is flipping between the two modes. At night on a phone, some apps are incredibly painful to read. Even darkish flavours can be ruined with bright splash screens. There's just no consistency here.
mjw1007 7y ago
I think the switch to black-on-white when GUIs first appeared was largely because the prototypical application was a word processor, where the selling point was that what you saw on the screen looked like what you were going to print on paper. Other applications, like spreadsheets, ended up with a lot of the the same printer-oriented design. It showed up in things like font sizes in points (which are nominally length units, but were usually based on some fixed notional dpi rather than matching the size on the physical screen).
- rsynnott 7y ago
  I suspect it's more about high refresh rate CRTs. On low refresh rate, blocks of colour really were very unpleasant to look at, but this went away over about 70hz. Of course, this was never an issue on LCDs. There was also an intermediate period where backgrounds were usually _blue_.

downtide 7y ago

In netscape the default background colour used to be black on light grey. I find that much easier on my eyes than black on white. Even a light yellow with dark green text. But given a dark room I like to switch the other way. See how you feel with a terminal/editor in different colour schemes. So bright room, bright scheme, dark room dark scheme. What I can't stand is flipping between the two modes. At night on a phone, some apps are incredibly painful to read. Even darkish flavours can be ruined with bright splash screens. There's just no consistency here.

mjw1007 7y ago

I think the switch to black-on-white when GUIs first appeared was largely because the prototypical application was a word processor, where the selling point was that what you saw on the screen looked like what you were going to print on paper. Other applications, like spreadsheets, ended up with a lot of the the same printer-oriented design. It showed up in things like font sizes in points (which are nominally length units, but were usually based on some fixed notional dpi rather than matching the size on the physical screen).

rsynnott 7y ago
I suspect it's more about high refresh rate CRTs. On low refresh rate, blocks of colour really were very unpleasant to look at, but this went away over about 70hz. Of course, this was never an issue on LCDs. There was also an intermediate period where backgrounds were usually _blue_.