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Ask HN: Why has it taken so long for “dark mode” to become popular?

• rumanator 7y ago
  My subjective and personal observation is that LCD panels represented black by turning on the pixels to become opaque and stop the backlight from pass through the panel. This strategy worked well to get to relatively black pixels but a few years back typical consumer LCD panels were not very good at this and allowed a significant amount of light to pass through. When applied to large areas of the screen this, at least to me, made the screen look wrong and not enjoyable, specially after being exposed long enough. Therefore, as the user experience with non-dark modes was better, dark modes were simply not used. Nowadays consumer-grade LCD panels are able to represent better contrast, thus the overall experience has improved. My 0.02€.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• raidicy 7y ago
  I am not sure but I really hope the trend continues. Especially for Excel/Word. My eyes are are pretty sensitive and while my OS and most of my apps are using "dark mode" opening Excel or seeing a white web page actually hurts.
  • gjvc 7y ago
    Make sure you investigate "flux" on windows, night light on mac, sct(1) on linux, amongst others. I use a colour temperature of 3000K maximum during the day and 2700K at night.
• burfog 7y ago
  It was standard for MS-DOS, the VT100, and many other things of that era. It was common with X on UNIX-like systems in the early 1990s. Once WYSIWYG document processing became popular, people wanted computers to mimic normal paper documents.