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Ask HN: How did dark mode win?

• silicaroach 5y ago
  I have astigmatism and dark mode is a nightmare for any length of time. I'm not a fan.
  • throwaway6532 5y ago
    I hated it and rallied against it for so long and couldn't understand why anyone liked it and then I learned this was a thing and it all suddenly made sense.
• didip 5y ago
  Because dark mode is superior. It can be used during day time and it doesn't give you headache at night time.
  • gpas 5y ago
    No it's not. At least not for me and others on this thread.
• bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
  I always thought it was because dark mode is generally better on the phone battery.
  • moasda 5y ago
    Yes, I also heared that argument. But I also can see a lot of web pages with dark theme that are not designed for mobile devices. For me it looks like following a trend.
    • lovich 5y ago
      Still saves power. Don’t know if anyone remembers blackle.com but people have been considering it for a long time
• moasda 5y ago
  I have never understood why companies spend so much effort to maintain two themes in their web apps or mobile apps. At least for developers I finally found a good explanation: Why do developers prefer the dark theme? Because the light attracts bugs.
  • throwaway6532 5y ago
    >Why do developers prefer the dark theme? Because the light attracts bugs. Rofl.
  • hulitu 5y ago
    Because implementing settings is expensive. And now you can choose between 2 evils: dark mode or light mode. I would like a coloured contrast mode but i bet that it will be released in around 10 years as a great inovation (which was present in win 9x and X windows since ages)
• jfengel 5y ago
  Google Maps is one case where I don't think it's frivolous. It's often used as an in-car guidance app, and driving at night you really do want more than just turning down the brightness. That's a solution that seems to work for every other app I use, and the phone does it for me. I try to avoid custom modes of anything as much as I can. I prefer the default-case experience, which is usually the best optimized and least likely to get me into a situation I can't get out of. The impression I get is that developers are noisy about it, and since they're the ones in the room, their voices get heard. Other users who want different forms of accessibility don't attract as much attention and so it's not top of anybody's backlog.
• mikewarot 5y ago
  As you get older, your corneas will begin to blur light into dark areas, at that point it is almost impossible to read black text on a white screen. Dark mode makes it possible to see far smaller things than you can see otherwise. This is particularly important on phones with their tiny screens, or when doing things with lots of details, no matter how big the display. The default used to be light text on a dark window, for decades before the Mac and Windows came along. There were many reasons for it besides avoiding screen burn.
  • NiagaraThistle 5y ago
    I'm not sure how old "as you get older" is, but as at 43 and after a decade+ of staring at my computer programming every, I can say that darm mode is the worst and I find it more difficult to read white/light text on black/dark backgrounds. Same with consuming any content on a dark background. Some sites look aesthetically pleasing in Dark mode, but I'd never choose to consume content on them.
    • olvy0 5y ago
      Yeah, I'm in my 40s too and I find dark mode very difficult to read, especially when I have to read code or write it. Even at night when I'm sitting in the darkness. I do use flux [0] though, because the default monitor brightness is too bright for me, even in broad daylight, never mind at night. For my smartphone I use the Twilight app, which isn't as good but better than nothing. Not sure about the whole blue light thing but it's very easy on my eyes, much better than dark mode. [0] https://justgetflux.com/ https://justgetflux.com/
    • upofadown 5y ago
      I think that the dark mode advantage for bad eyesight is specific to things like cataracts that cause haze. So you probably don't have any such condition.
    • mech422 5y ago
      At 55, I vastly prefer dark modes...I generally find light modes too bright, too harsh.. Also, 'light modes' seem to differ a lot more in color then dark modes. Seems like you always have to fiddle with the contrast since some sights are bright white, and others are cream.
• donkarma 5y ago
  i struggle when reading pages that only have dark theme as it hurts my eyes which is really annoying, glad firefox has reader mode
• aught 5y ago
  I get headaches and light themes feel like someone is stabbing me in the eyes. Dimming, dark themes etc are sometimes still too bright. Even when I don’t have a headache I still prefer a dark or gray mode.
• Barrin92 5y ago
  Because people have gotten used to using their devices at night and in badly lit rooms. I think it's one of the worst design trends in recent times with negative effects: "[...]To summarize, a dark-on-light (positive polarity) display like a Mac in Light Mode provides better performance in focusing of the eye, identifying letters, transcribing letters, text comprehension, reading speed, and proofreading performance, and at least some older studies suggest that using a positive polarity display results in less visual fatigue and increased visual comfort. The benefits apply to both the young and the old" https://tidbits.com/2019/05/31/the-dark-side-of-dark-mode/ https://tidbits.com/2019/05/31/the-dark-side-of-dark-mode/
  • dehrmann 5y ago
    > dark-on-light (positive polarity) display like a Mac in Light Mode provides better performance in... Sure, but it doesn't look as cool.
  • _8j50 5y ago
    White screen strains the eyes and makes it hard to relax while staring at the screen in a dark room. It really depends on the dark mode implementatiom, some botch it to where reading text is hard. Dark grey should be the most extreme dark color in a dark theme.
    • guenthert 5y ago
      Turn on the light in the room, your eyes will thank you for it.
• jamil7 5y ago
  One problem is once every other app is supporting it, it's hard not too, especially on mobile. I'm working on an iOS app at the moment in which it was decided to defer doing dark mode - every time I switch into it on my phone in dark mode it feels really out of place and noticeable.
  • Kon-Peki 5y ago
    I haven't distributed an iOS app since the Objective-C days, but I was recently going through SwiftUI tutorials and one of them deals with adding dark mode to an app. It appears to be quite simple, especially if you are beginning an app from scratch. I was pretty surprised by that.
    • jamil7 5y ago
      It’s simple if you’re using mostly stock design and colours, it’s a bit more of a pain with a custom design system etc.
• sigstoat 5y ago
  it’s especially fascinating since it was conventional wisdom amongst HN and every designer that i ran into that somehow white backgrounds were easiest and also you should use grey text to reduce contrast. (added: we’ve got some of those folks popping up in this thread now.) and then bam one day we’ve got dark backgrounds everywhere.
• bananamerica 5y ago
  I always liked darker things, even outside computers. Whenever I can make something darker, I do it. Feels much comfortable to the eyes. Bit I'm pretty sure light UIs are still the most popular. Maybe not in certain crowds, but for the general public, I think light UI is king.
• Koshkin 5y ago
  When the screens were tiny by today's standards (like the screen in the original Macintosh), black-on-white kind of made sense. But with the large screens too much white hurts the eyes.
  • guenthert 5y ago
    If your screen outshines the background so much that your eyes hurt, perhaps its time to dim the screen or light up the background?
    • t-3 5y ago
      There is a seeming trend of super-bright lower bounds to screen brightness. I can't even look at my phone directly in a dark room on the lowest brightness. I stopped using the GUI on my newest laptop and went to console-only because it is also blindingly bright
  • hulitu 5y ago
    Yeah, "larger wide 14" screens". Or larger 5 " screens on phones .
  • perilunar 5y ago
    Black on white on the original Mac was a novelty at the time — most earlier computers had monochrome screens, usually green, amber or white on black.
• onlywicked 5y ago
  Dark mode started to become popular after phones started to use OLED screens. To save battery and burning issues.
• Tarucho 5y ago
  Dark mode won because nowadays it´s associated with "new". When I started coding in the 90s dark mode was associated with old. "Cobol dinos" used dark modes, we "cool kids" used light modes. Nowadays if you ask most young programmers they will say that light mode is old. They use dark mode. And I guess this idea of hip, has turned mainstream lately. The latest uses "dark"
  • phendrenad2 5y ago
    This is definitely part of it. I've gotten snide comments from people while screensharing or posting screenshots because I use light mode.
• jbb67 5y ago
  it didn't. it's just a fad amongst young programmers that will slowly dissipate
  • missedthecue 5y ago
    Back in the early days of desktop computing, dark mode was the only option! :-)
• Kalanos 5y ago
  developers develop apps and like dark mode. light mode hurts my eyes
• jrootabega 5y ago
  I think a lot of it was just young, trendy counterculture that followed the shift in tech demographics in the last few decades. Sublime Text was hot and it was dark. Another thing that helped it along was the fact that when your eyes adjust to a dark mode app, context switching to a "light mode" app is painful on the eyes. So people reinforced the idea that "light mode" hurts, rather than that switching hurts.
• treeman79 5y ago
  Often have severe migraines. When it’s coming on Dark mode is sometimes the difference between major or mild. Night shift helps some.s Fl-41 glasses work much better, but I often don’t have them handy.
• Karawebnetwork 5y ago
  It's become easier to implement them. Now that many people moved their CSS into JS and that components are more standalone, you can simply flip a flag and use another color palette. Take this React pseudocode as an example. Before, you would have to handle it manually. "html.dark-theme .menu .menu-item .menu-link {color: white; background: black;}" ... for every single style declaration. Sure, preprocessors made them easier in the way that you could simply do ".dark-theme & {}" which would generate the style declarations for you. But it was still a bit of a pain and required using things like mixins that add an extra layer of complexity and support. Now, your React component can simply be myAwesomeComponent: { titleColor: theme.text, cardBackground: theme.highlight, cssOverrides: css`border:1px solid ${theme.borderColor};` } Then you have something somewhere that just flip the theme. const darkTheme = {text:"#fff", highlight:"#000", borderColor: "#ccc"}; mySuperCoolApp.setCurrentTheme(darkTheme); This makes adding a bunch of themes an afterthought. On an internal app that I worked on, I made a bunch of themes as easter eggs. All that was needed was to duplicate the theme declarations and change the colors. So some users could decide to use different colors. Another point is that accessibility is becoming more mandatory than before. If you are required by law to support multiple font-sizes, you might as well make it so that you can support multiple colors. It allows things like high-contrast accessibility themes and you can throw in a few extra fun ones just to make your app stand out.
• tailspin2019 5y ago
  It doesn’t really feel like it has “won”. Lighter themes are still overwhelmingly the default option (and sometimes the only option). I can’t think of any app or website where dark mode has been added as a “forced” choice. The addition of a dark mode is almost always implemented as an optional feature and you can generally choose your preference. So from a user’s point of view, I can only see this as a positive addition. For those of us who prefer dark mode, for a variety of reasons, we enjoy having the choice. For those who prefer lighter themes, nothing really is being taken away. The more interesting question to me is why this topic evokes such strong emotions with one side stating often in very strong terms how “wrong” the other side is!
  • watermelon0 5y ago
    Off the top of my head, I can name at least Grafana, Visual Studio Code, and JetBrains IDEs, as the (web)apps that default to dark mode, but have optional light theme. Additionally, AFAIK, InfluxDB UI (previously known as Chronograf), only supports dark mode.
    • tailspin2019 5y ago
      > Off the top of my head, I can name at least Grafana, Visual Studio Code, and JetBrains IDEs, as the (web)apps that default to dark mode, but have optional light theme. My point (perhaps not worded clearly enough) was that there are very few cases where only dark mode is available. I was trying to say that in most cases where a dark mode has been added, a light mode is also available. I'll give you InfluxDB but, like Grafana, there is a use case of those systems being used on large TV screens so the dark UI has perhaps more of a functional reason behind it than other software.
    • wruza 5y ago
      Is VSCode dark by default? I believe it’s standard theme has white bg.
      • TingPing 5y ago
        It is dark by default.
• andrewf 5y ago
  The big companies were going to be launching redesigns anyway - as institutions, they're not equipped to "don't fix what isn't broken."
• rhizome 5y ago
  I'll suggest two things: the idea, however misguided, of saving battery power on cellphones, and Quake II. Before dark mode became Dark Mode, gray type on black was a popular enough design aesthetic to inform the more functional implementations later on. Batteries have been insufficient for the entire smart phone era.
• jml7c5 5y ago
  I think you're underestimating just how much some people like dark mode; people have been clamoring for it for a long time. Be it for aesthetics, for power saving on OLED screens (a big factor that drove early per-app toggles on Android), and for comfort if light UIs are painful. Once it became a common system-wide option and developers didn't have to create inconsistent per-application toggles, it was a feature that users expected everywhere. 2016-08-08: Windows 10 Anniversary update includes system-wide dark mode option. 2018-06-04: W3C issue created for light/dark mode via CSS: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2735 https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2735 2018-09-24: MacOS 10.14 (Mojave) includes system-wide dark mode option. Safari tech preview adds the CSS media query `prefers-color-scheme`. 2019: All major browsers implement `prefers-color-scheme`. Et voilà, dark mode everywhere. Personally, I'm more interested in high-contrast modes. (Available in CSS via the experimental but widely implemented `prefers-contrast` media query. Web devs, support it today! Make life easier for those of us who struggle when forced to stray from good ol' #FFFFFF and #000000.)
  • guenthert 5y ago
    Personally, I'm more interested in a night-vision mode, i.e. black (not contrast reducing grey) background and red/orange text. Chiefly for nightly outdoor activities, e.g. astronomy observations.
    • jml7c5 5y ago
      I actually read most books like this! Red text on black background. It's especially nice in the evening: light above 580 nm doesn't appreciably activate ipRGCs, so melatonin sythesis isn't inhibited. And if the device had an OLED screen, its battery can last for days. I wish GPUs had programmable scanout "hooks", so that you could run a bit of hard-realtime code to modify colors as they went out. As it stands, you can either twiddle the colorspace knobs (limited control, can't do perceptual color->grayscale), or you can get the system compositor to run a color conversion pixel shader to modify the display buffer. The latter is infinitely customizeable, but eats into frame budget, bandwidth, and runs the risk of not finishing in time for scanout. (Now I'm wondering if something like this has been added to more recent GPUs, or if it's been there all along and I didn't realize it. Time to do some research.)
• syntheweave 5y ago
  Dark mode has a strong preference among some computer users because it works better in dark "computing caves" with low ambient light; when you consider that older screens were relatively dimmer and had severe glare issues, the computer cave was itself a sensible way to do computing. I know I was all about dark mode 15 years ago or so with my first LCD monitor. But it's also primarily a young person's thing to be able to stay in the cave. Older people are more often put in a position where strong ambient light is assumed, either because of job/household environment or because their eyesight starts to prefer it.
  • guenthert 5y ago
    On old screens (CRT) dark background was preferred, as the screen-flicker is more noticeable the brighter the screen and the lower the refresh rate (and shorter the fluorescence of the screen). Screens with high refresh rate were expensive and rare before the nineties. Atari ST monochrome display was an exception.
  • hulitu 5y ago
    Until they realize that in the real world their eyes lost sensibility.
• sebnukem2 5y ago
  What I want to know is why I'm not reading this in dark mode.
• StewardMcOy 5y ago
  To answer the question of who within an organization pushed to prioritize it: Users, lots of them. I've worked on few big apps and sites that needed to adopt dark mode, and even before browsers and operating systems implemented preferences for dark mode, it wasn't an uncommon feature request from users to completely redesign the apps/sites to be dark, even if that meant replacing the light color scheme. Once browsers implemented prefers-color-scheme, we got lots of requests every day months until we implemented dark mode. Project managers had to prioritize it because it was in such demand. There's lots of research that dark text on a light background is easier to read, but I suspect it differs by individual. I've always had a much easier time with light text on a dark background. Light tends to bleed at the edges for me, so light backgrounds make dark text look thin, while dark backgrounds make light text look bold, much easier to recognize. From reading a lot of the user requests, I'm not alone. For various reasons, lots of people have an easier time reading light-on-dark. An interesting related question for me is, when did dark modes start becoming so unusual? Sure, they were never universal, but there were quite a few sites in the late 1990s that would have a dark mode link that would set a cookie that would swap out the CSS for dark mode. There were even a few sites that would flip over to dark mode at night. It wasn't used for large corporate sites, but there were also apps that allowed user skinning, and I suspect dark mode sites started to disappear around the same time app skinning did.
  • habosa 5y ago
    Do you think the users that want dark mode representative of the user base at large? My gut feeling is that it's especially popular among users who are Very Online like programmers, designers, etc. which tend to be the type of users that file a lot of feedback and feature requests.
    • StewardMcOy 5y ago
      I definitely think that was the case before iOS and macOS introduced system-wide dark mode. With the exception of a small number of people with very specific vision issues, I would say that those filing requests for dark mode were mostly power users who were used to filing requests. I think after Apple made dark mode a feature of iOS and macOS, we started seeing a lot more requests from average users. Marketing works.
• caseyf7 5y ago
  Dark mode hasn’t won until it is offered by Hacker News and The New York Times
• perilunar 5y ago
  It’s a tribute to Leonard Cohen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Want_It_Darker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Want_It_Darker
• KolenCh 5y ago
  The trend kick started when the iPhone X has a OLED screen, and people start mentioning you can save a lot of power by turning on “invert color” switch. And then gradually apps are adding dark mode as a kind of differentiation factor. Gradually this spread to desktop (perhaps because macOS starts to offer it systemwide) and recently to the web too (I notice now I browse something like GitHub and it will follow OS setting to turn to dark mode, where I set it to sync with the sun.)