9 ms·

Light Mode InFFFFFFlation

226 points by Fudgel 9mo ago

temp0826 9mo ago
I wonder how much brighter (nits) screens have become over the same period as well.
- paulnpace 9mo ago
  When I went from BlackBerry to Android (Samsung), I noticed the Android was much dimmer, though BlackBerry devices had gotten brighter. My experience is from 8700c through 9900 Bold.
- exmadscientist 9mo ago
  None at all, if you're setting them up correctly. 100-150 nits (cd/m²) is just about right. I color-calibrate my monitors and this is one step in the flow. I calibrate to 120 nits and find that it's consistently about 33% brightness. Calibrating this way, I can look at a full white screen (think "blank notepad window") with no particular eyestrain.
  - cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
    My issue with running most monitors this dim is that colors look so much worse and contrast is lost. It’s not as much of a problem on my OLED phone though, which does tend toward the dimmer side. My desktop monitors (IPS) on the other hand are rarely below 50%.
    - exmadscientist 9mo ago
      I have never noticed that problem. But I always adjust brightness as part of a full color calibration, with ICC profile and everything, which probably makes a difference. I will say that it took a bit to adjust to the first time I did it, but now it's painful to use any monitor at "full" 200+ nit brightness.
Doches 9mo ago
I’ve noticed this tendency in my own UI work as well: dark designs tend to get darker, and light designs lighter, when updated or refreshed in isolation. Is there a term for this kind of ratcheting effect?
- findthewords 9mo ago
  Polarization, reflecting the polarization in economics and politics?
- AlienRobot 9mo ago
  Flanderization?
kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
The root cause may just be the increase in dead space caused by mobile first UIs.
- zerocrates 9mo ago
  The author looks like they've only looked at the color of the dead space so probably not significant for this specifically. The trend against skueuomorphism maybe equally relevant: that early example is a descendant of Apple's previous brushed-metal UI. Though even among the flat ones there's been a trend toward lightening. It'd also be interesting to see what area the author picked on each screenshot: a big difference, at least before Tahoe, if you decide that the Finder sidebar or top bar is what you're going to look at.
  - willhbr 9mo ago
    I picked the window chrome from Safari or Finder for each version, as similar as I could get to the highlighted area in the screenshot. My intent was to capture the shade of the non-content area in the window.
- qball 9mo ago
  No. The reason Light Mode has been getting lighter is simple: because the default computer in 2025 is now a laptop or phone, whereas in 2009 it was a desktop. Laptops and phones have easy and relatively coarse brightness adjustment settings for their screens. Desktops didn't, and still don't. So it makes sense that you'd just make whites as bright as possible- if the user doesn't like that, they can just turn the brightness down. Otherwise you're just kind of leaving the monitor's available/potential contrast on the table. Note that Dark Modes skyrocketed in popularity after the default computer changed from being a desktop to a laptop- but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through). The next change to this trend will occur, specifically to Dark Mode, 1-2 years after the average machine a software designer is issued for work has an OLED screen- because OLED screens actually can get that dim, the current color balance will likely be inappropriate.
CharlesW 9mo ago
> Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were… Things people born after Macintosh say.
- jonstewart 9mo ago
  Exactamundo.
- louthy 9mo ago
  True. This was how my first computer was [1] I didn’t call it dark mode though! [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Hard_reset_BBC_Micro_32K_Acorn_DFS.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Hard_res...
- csense 9mo ago
  I spent an enormous amount of time in DOS, color 7 on color 0, gray on black. The IDE everybody used was aggressively gray on blue [1]. Which is #AAAAAA on #000000 to you kids with your fancy Super VGA monitors with megabytes of video memory and 24-bit color. This white background stuff is the invention of Microsoft or somebody's marketing department, who decided people would be less afraid of computers if they made the screen look like a piece of paper. Back in my day we only used 16 colors at a time [2], because you had to quarter the resolution if you wanted more than that, because of course video memory has to fit in a 64k segment -- why would anyone even want to go bigger, wouldn't that consume way too much conventional memory? And if you did decide you wanted to use 8-bit mode, if you wanted square pixels you had to read Michael Abrash's book and do terrible black magic involving directly programming VGA registers and bank-switched bit-planes. If you don't know what any of that means, it means you kids've got it way too easy these days and don't even know it. The real programmers who knew all this stuff and made brilliant masterpieces like Master of Magic and the original X-COM were scattered to the winds when the original Microprose folded. Now get off my lawn. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic#/media/File:QBasic_Opening_Screen.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic#/media/File:QBasic_Open... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#With_an_RGBI_monitor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#With_an...
- willhbr 9mo ago
jsheard 9mo ago
In real terms dark modes have gotten darker too, at least on mobile, due to the proliferation of OLEDs with infinite contrast. #000000 went from "the darkest grey the display can manage" to "no light whatsoever".
- zerocrates 9mo ago
  Also shown on the chart, to a smaller degree. And more noticeable on mobile probably where there's lots of OLEDs and concern about battery usage.
piskov 9mo ago
> My eyes will thank you Sometimes I think the most hate for light mode is from people without autobrightness in their displays. Or from those who don’t know how to change it easily. Sure, if I were to constantly blind myself with 10k lux, I would hate white background too. But it isn’t supposed to be like that: make it the same brightness as the surroundings and voila. I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black. Also with glossy display (like 6k xdr) the only way I can deal with reflections is by always using light mode. Alabaster code theme is my favorite. If you don’t have auto brightness, there are many apps to change it easily via UI or keyboard instead of manual knobs of your monitor — most of them for the past 10 years support control via hdmi/displayport — I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume — every soundtrack should be lounge cafe del mar.” Or “I use this browser extension to make everything 5% loud.” Well, just turn down the volume knob, dummy.
- troupo 9mo ago
  > I’ve never met a person saying he hates books and wishes they were white on black. Books don't emit light. They reflect it. That's the difference.
  - piskov 9mo ago
    It doesn’t matter what the source is (unless you have crt days flicker, bad tn panel polarization or what have you). Irritation comes from the difference in brightness.
    - Krutonium 9mo ago
      Reflection means it's got no difference (or a negligable technically) difference in brightness.
      - orbital-decay 9mo ago
        My mirror disagrees.
imwally 9mo ago
I’m not a big fan of dark mode and I seem to be in the minority these days. Probably 99% of my colleagues at work use dark mode and when I screen share I get the usual “ah, my eyes!” The interesting thing is, I’ve noticed when I read white on black and look elsewhere I see horizontal lines in my vision. So really I’m the one who should be shouting about their eyes. Maybe that’s just me, though? I guess I want my computing experience to be like that of reading a book. Not sure I’d like white text on black paper.
- culi 9mo ago
  I definitely feel that during the day but have the inverse experience when the sun has set (light mode feels unbearable after dark). I like my code editor to respect my OS which automatically changes from light to dark mode when the sun sets.
  - krackers 9mo ago
    Even with flux? Shifting the white point is far more comfortable than dark mode for me. In fact it also matches with the ambient lighting, 4000-6000k during the daytime then 2000-2700k after sunset.
- _lnrx 9mo ago
  Yeah, I also see the horizontal lines, but only after a while of reading white on black on my phone. But on any devices white on black text appears to me slightly blurry or doubling.
  - UltimateEdge 9mo ago
    This is also my experience. Do you have astigmatism?
    - imwally 9mo ago
      Yes, I do!
    - 9mo ago
findthewords 9mo ago
I think that pure white (255) and pure black (0) should be using extremely sparingly. #FFFFFF? Why not #f6f6ef or #eceff4? Lower contrast can improve legibility, too much contrast can hinder it. #000000? Why not #121821, a dark shade of blue? Nothing in real life is perfectly dark. Thankfully HN has remained pleasingly off-white.
- piskov 9mo ago
  > improve legibility Hilarious how this downvoted comment proves it is not. (Update: it became black again) There should be a special place in hell for those light-grey-text-loving designers.
  - pseudalopex 9mo ago
    They did not claim not enough contrast is impossible.
  - ziml77 9mo ago
    It's possible to have contrast too low, that doesn't mean maximum contrast is the best. Even HN doesn't go full black on white, the background is off-white.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
throwuxiytayq 9mo ago
Dark mode simply makes sense. Black pixels == no light == no photoreceptor stimulation == the default state. The fact that we used to blast our eyes with near-fully lit displays is a historical artifact of the early days of graphical computer interfaces. I find it annoying (and potentially medically dangerous to some people) that certain actions result in a short white flash while the content is rendered. Mostly happens in web-related apps. Light mode is masochism mode, with just a few exceptions: e-ink, highly lit environments (that are uncomfortable to work in anyways), people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better, and weirdos who enjoy staring at a flashlight. If you're gonna use that, might as well just turn down the screen brightness - but I agree with the author that perhaps a middle ground "gray theme" would be better, if slightly less attractive to UI designers.
- krackers 9mo ago
  You could equally say "we're evolved to hunt during the daytime, where you scan the environment when the surroundings are bright."
- lukeinator42 9mo ago
  Light mode constricts your pupil more, which means less eye strain for the eye when focusing because of the better depth of field. Also, black pixels != no light except in technologies such as oled, but most laptops are backlit lcds.
- pseudalopex 9mo ago
  > people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better Astigmatism is very common.
3rodents 9mo ago
I have stared at a light mode screen for 16 hours a day for 20 years without even the hint of discomfort. 5 minutes of dark mode and my eyes feel someone is shining lasers at me. I have concluded that light mode is for light mode people and dark mode is for dark mode people. Making light mode a little darker or dark mode a little lighter isn’t going to change how people experience interfaces. Make light mode for light people and dark mode for dark mode people. Maybe things are getting brighter, but it hasn’t been noticeable to me.
- culi 9mo ago
  16 hours a day is a lot. How's your sleep?
- csense 9mo ago
  Did you ever use CRT monitors or were the computers you used already LCD by the time you were spending significant amounts of time on them? (Gosh, I feel old thinking about the possibility that someone who's been doing this for 20 years might still be too young to have ever used a CRT monitor.)
  - layer8 9mo ago
    CRTs had already pretty much fallen out of use as computer monitors in 2006.
itopaloglu83 9mo ago
This isn’t even good design Apple used to known for anymore, making everything glassy and sacrificing the user health is simply asinine. Computers are not meant to be decorations that sit on a shelf, but interacted with all day, and the fact that we’re missing that aspect speaks volumes.
culi 9mo ago
I also feel like there's fewer websites with prominent color schemes/colored backgrounds. I wonder if sites are sticking to light/dark backgrounds more specifically so they can support modern CSS features like `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)`
- coffeefirst 9mo ago
  Yes! And the designs themselves are being constrained to aesthetics that can look pretty good in light or dark mode.
h1fra 9mo ago
There is something in the air regarding dark mode, lots of people are starting to admit dark mode UI are often harder to read, harder to build, or not worth the effort. Maybe we are past peak dark-mode
- 420official 9mo ago
  A well designed dark mode UI is just as readable as a well designed light mode UI. The issue is a lot of designers design light mode then just try to invert for dark mode rather than actually designing for dark mode. I'd imagine your post would exist for light mode if we had started with dark mode as the default.
  - pseudalopex 9mo ago
    > A well designed dark mode UI is just as readable as a well designed light mode UI. This could be correct if astigmatism was rare.[1] [1] https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-accessibility-issues-than-it-solves-54cddf6466f5 https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-access...
  - orbital-decay 9mo ago
    A lot of software is dark-mode first but it's still not right. Good dark schemes are just really hard to design, there are just too many nuanced differences. Color perception is maybe 10% of it. Typographics, line thickness, optical balance, accounting for massively increased contrast, antialiasing, layout, picture rendering, absolutely everything should be done differently on dark backgrounds. And it depends too much on your environment, the type of display, and its pixel density, unlike in light mode which is way more forgiving to external factors.
- joe_the_user 9mo ago
  I think a factor is that when a significant design innovation appears, it has to be reasonably usable to get traction. But changes to an existing paradigm just have to be distinctive. Hence light-mode gets lighter and lighter 'till misery/unusability, dark mode then get something-distinctive until also unusable and people go searching for third way. Kind of a particular instance of enshittification.
orbital-decay 9mo ago
By trying to outsmart your monitor brightness setting and micromanaging it yourself per-app you're killing the consistency. This should be used for relative color schemes in your app, not for micromanaging the brightness. Neutral grey makes sense in two cases: - Relative color schemes in which your elements can be either lighter or darker than the background. - Precise color grading, because white and black backgrounds shift color perception too much. If you feel the background is too bright, either add more light in the room, or reduce the monitor brightness. It's all relative, it physically cannot have too much absolute brightness to hurt your eyes. The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt. What hurts them is excessive contrast: staring at the monitor in the dark room, pure black color schemes on OLED screens, etc. This looks jarring and breaks eye adaptation.
- rented_mule 9mo ago
  > The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt. It turns out bodies don't all respond the same way to the same stimuli. Sunny days cause me real pain. A thin layer of ground fog with bright sun above it is brutal for me, as is bright sun with snow on the ground. I feel so much more comfortable outside on a dark, cloudy day. My eye doctor tells me she frequently hears the same from others. Each of us has a different response curve to light levels.
wasmperson 9mo ago
I was never a fan of the "Dark Mode"/"Light Mode" trend. "We've added support to our website/application for a whole TWO themes!" Meanwhile: - One of the two themes is always worse, but which one it is is different from application to application - Despite the above, I'm required to decide globally whether I'm a "dark mode" or "light mode" person, with no option to just let the application or website decide on its own which theme is best. - Because designers now need to support inverted contrast everywhere, everything has to be monochrome, including icons, text, backgrounds, etc. I'd honestly rather people just picked one theme and directed their efforts towards making it look as good as possible. Or, you know, add support for real custom theming so I can make it look however I want.
AlienRobot 9mo ago
My hypothesis is that this has to do with the whitening of the UI. Personally I love Windows XP because it's so colorful. The taskbar is blue. The start button is green. The window frame is blue, the close button is red. The sidebars are tinted yellow. Even icons like CD-roms aren't greyscale, but tinted purple instead. Since then, people started removing color from everything. Colorful icons became monochrome, perhaps only so it could be easily switched from "light mode" to "dark mode" by switching their colors from black to white and vice-versa. Everything is now harder to see. On Linux, most attempts to mimic retro GUIs fail because they can't tint different parts internal of a window of different colors, such as tinting only the sidebar a shade of yellow. This is rather ironic given that GTK's CSS theoretically could allow this. But in practice there is no stable public "API" for the classses used inside an application to allow users to re-style them easily with CSS. Even if I could do .sidebar { color: #ff0; }, I don't know the class name that my file manager used for its sidebar, for example, so I can't really do that. In my opinion this the main reason modern UI's feel so bland and lifeless.
- genewitch 9mo ago
  i have never thought about the fact that prior to win8(?) that windows explorer had different shades for everything. I have thought about the default windows 95/98 themes, as i have painted my bedrooms for 25 years the exact shade of one specific part of the "computer properties" window in win98, "extreme gloss". at night, it's pitch black and during the day, the high-gloss makes it very lively and bright. I can't imagine having some other color for a room i sleep in (the ceiling is white, i'm not a barbarian).
levocardia 9mo ago
I suspect the trend would be even more extreme if multiplied by typical screen brightness over time!
- genewitch 9mo ago
  i play helldivers 2 on an HDR monitor and i nearly always balk at playing daytime missions because the in game light source "sun" literally hurts my eyes to look at. However, barring that (i mean, midday sun is nearly impossible for me, in real life, too, right?), like websites, the backgrounds look brighter on my 1080p TV i have connected to the computer, even though it is set up for the correct colors, so windows understands that letting webdevs attack my retinas is unacceptable, at least.
whizzter 9mo ago
Comments here lambasting too bright background/letters.. QuickBasic/QBasic/edit.com(and turbo pascal?) darkish blue background and grey text was just damn comfortable and why we turned our backs on it is beyond me.
chr15m 9mo ago
I miss the Apple IIe with its pure orange cathode rays on the pitch black of zero light emission, gently lazing my eyeballs each day as I clacked BASIC into the REPL.
mberning 9mo ago
Interfaces used to be “battle ship grey” which I loved.
jedbrooke 9mo ago
For me there’s something about context that shapes my dark mode vs light mode preference. Code and terminals is dark, documents/web/chat is light. For some reason I can’t stand dark mode slack/discord, but dark mode IDE is preferred. Also, there’s just something about the graph of “Average brightness of MacOS screenshots over the years” and extrapolating it that tickles my brain. By 2030 MacOS light mode will just be a single white rectangle (with a notch). It reminds me of the “Number of youtube videos on the homepage” blog that extrapolates that by 2030 there will be 0 videos on the homepage.
quotemstr 9mo ago
That's adorable. You think light mode is getting too light? Just wait until people figure out the eyeball-searing power of HDR gamut annotations. OLED devices usually keep plenty of nits in reserve in normal operation. Pop in some HDR content and you get the device to pump more photons into the user's eyeball.
pmontra 9mo ago
I use mixed mode: editor and terminal on black background (and US keymap) everything else on white background (and my country keymap.) There is no particular reason for that except habits. I started programming on black background terminals and the first anything else happened on Unix workstations or Windows PCs with white backgrounds. I adjust the overall brightness of my screen according to the light level of the room and I use night mode. When I happen to use some other computer in dark mode it's usually too dark: white characters are often too thin and don't enjoy enough light to be readable. Maybe dark mode is for young eyes or for people that are very sensitive to glare.
satvikpendem 9mo ago
Good. I want FFFFFF and 000000, not any light and dark grays which are just annoying to read. Especially with my OLED monitor, it's amazing to see pure blacks and vivid whites, so much so that I use the Dark Reader extension everywhere and when that doesn't cut it, I use custom stylesheets for certain websites to make the `body { background: black; }`.
- eek2121 9mo ago
  Agree...mostly. HN Dark mode hack is alright. Legit even. If you have uBlock Origin, add this as a rule: news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter: invert(90%) hue-rotate(180deg); background: white) The result: dark grays/browns without sacrificing the orange header and without breaking inputs like some other stuff I've seen. I do like pure black for most apps, however, it does get boring after a while. Mix in stuff like this on HN or elsewhere to mix things up. Wanting to save battery life is fine and all, however, some things should be fun/entertaining. ;)
  - satvikpendem 9mo ago
    Eh I don't want any grays or browns, the black and white and orange theme I get from dark reader is great, actually looks good, even. I also went to the HN settings and set the orange header to 000000 too, haha.
- kccqzy 9mo ago
  FFFFFF and 000000 are simply too much contrast for my eyes to read comfortably regardless of which is background and which is text. I prefer a background of ECECEC with text being 333333 if I’m in light mode, or the other way around in dark mode. It noticeably causes less discomfort for my eyes.
  - layer8 9mo ago
    You can adjust brightness and contrast so that 000000 looks like 333333 and FFFFFF looks like ECECEC. If that’s what feels comfortable to you, arguably that’s how it should be set.
taneq 9mo ago
Light mode decreases the localised dynamic range. Also, screens are way brighter than they used to be. It’s the visual equivalent of the loudness wars in broadcast audio. Is everything is loud/bright then nothing is, but everything is still more exhausting.
Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
> Somewhat in the spirit of Mavericks Forever, if I were to pick an old MacOS design to go back to it would probably be Yosemite. I don’t have any nostalgia for skeuomorphic brushed metal or stitched leather, but I do quite like the flattened design and blur effects that Yosemite brought. Ironically Yosemite was a substantial jump in brightness from previous versions. Author of Mavericks Forever here. I find it very surprising that the author complains about low contrast and then praises Yosemite. Yosemite is absolutely what started this trend, and the lack of contrast is why I hate it. This may not show up in the window chrome specifically, but the broader UI has way less contrast than Aqua. This actually got slightly better in 10.11 (El Capitan) before getting worse again. 10.9 and older are of course the best. Mavericks also has little brushed metal and zero stitched leather. The author is thinking of (Mountain) Lion, and of early iOS, which is much more skeuomorphic. P.S. Fine, you win, I just pushed an update to kill the animations.
kmeisthax 9mo ago
Discord did something similar. Their light mode used to be a lot more reasonable, with the sidebar still grey, then they decided to make it "actually light" because someone complained about it on Twitter. Now it's blindingly white. The white-fest also makes Liquid Glass on macOS basically flat mode with extra steps. Because all the fancy glass refraction effects don't actually do anything if you put them on a solid block of color.
Brajeshwar 9mo ago
My personal choice is kinda split between both modes. I like Light as a default, but prefer Dark for others. For instance, the IDE where I write code is always in the darker mode, but writing normal notes/prose, such as in Obsidian, Apple Notes, is always light. I also prefer the non-primary focus area to be of a darker shade; hence, the sidebar in my Obsidian is usually darker with light text while the main writing area is light (themes/settings does this). However, I prefer Dark Mode on my phone as the default, except for a few specific apps, such as Maps, even at night. I like minimal setup with less text and content during daytime but after sunset, the phone is set to be more pronounced (with labels, etc). I’m 40+ and I like sharper text and higher contrast especially when it is darker (night). Hence, the more pronounced Phone Setup; I should be able to read/know quick enough if I get a Whitelisted call at Night. I like apps that do not force but give me an option to have a choice between Light/Dark. In macOS, to use Dark Theme for Menubar and Dock (the periphery) but overall Light Theme for the main content, here is how to do it; 1. Go to System Preferences, then set the theme to LIGHT. 2. In Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool Yes` 3. Logout, then System Preferences, then set the theme to DARK If you wish to reset back to the default, in Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool No`
ranger207 9mo ago
Personally I like dark mode because most of the time my screen isn't looking at things that are majority pure white, it's looking at games, or videos, or blogs with a background color, or whatever. If I adjust my brightness to see relatively dark things comfortably, then things in light mode are now too bright. But since I look at more things that aren't pure white than pure white I adjust for the more common use case. The increase in blank space in UIs and the trend towards less color and differentiation have made the number of things where light mode is unbearable too high.
amluto 9mo ago
This has some questionable methodology. image = Image.open(file) greyscale = image.convert('L') stat = ImageStat.Stat(greyscale) avg_lightness = int(stat.mean[0]) That’s a non-gamma-corrected average, which generally doesn’t give good results. But also: > What I’ve graphed here is just the brightness of the window chrome, which isn’t really representative of the actual total screen brightness. No kidding. Also, Mac OS keeps changing the chrome, and this isn’t obviously a very useful measurement.
rendaw 9mo ago
I think the introduction of the "light mode" "dark mode" distinction actually made things worse. As a designer, before you had the whole spectrum to work with so you could have dark areas in light areas in dark areas, etc. Now, if you start with thinking "I'm working on a light-mode theme" you're suddenly restricted to only half the gamut for backgrounds, and you end up spreading things out more within that (more white, in order to contrast the slightly darker white). Plus you need to make it visually distinct from "dark mode" which means you're probably aiming for less than 50% gamut. I think it's a mental trap. Edit: And it's made worse by the fact that browsers now have built in light/dark mode preferences, standardizing this framing. So if you create something that doesn't fit in the light/dark boxes, you worry about users complaining of you not respecting their browser preferences.
walterbell 9mo ago
"Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes" (2020), 300 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33947820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33947820
adius 9mo ago
I use light mode during the day and dark mode in the evening, with the OS switching automatically based on the sun’s position. To me, this seems like the obvious way to decide when to use dark mode, but apparently I’m in a very small minority.
- genewitch 9mo ago
  i let my devices attempt to enforce this. Windows goes one further by automatically dimming my displays at a set time (it defaults to like 19:00 or 20:00). I wish my phone did this too, but i haven't found a way to have it do dim and undim automatically. anyhow if you read between the lines in many of the comments (above this one at this time), i get the idea that most people would answer "it depends" and the people who like light mode either have properly set up their display (130 nits was mentioned), people who have astigmatisms (mentioned), or people who don't know there's anything else.

226 points by Fudgel 9mo ago

temp0826 9mo ago

I wonder how much brighter (nits) screens have become over the same period as well.

paulnpace 9mo ago
When I went from BlackBerry to Android (Samsung), I noticed the Android was much dimmer, though BlackBerry devices had gotten brighter. My experience is from 8700c through 9900 Bold.
exmadscientist 9mo ago
None at all, if you're setting them up correctly. 100-150 nits (cd/m²) is just about right. I color-calibrate my monitors and this is one step in the flow. I calibrate to 120 nits and find that it's consistently about 33% brightness. Calibrating this way, I can look at a full white screen (think "blank notepad window") with no particular eyestrain.
- cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
  My issue with running most monitors this dim is that colors look so much worse and contrast is lost. It’s not as much of a problem on my OLED phone though, which does tend toward the dimmer side. My desktop monitors (IPS) on the other hand are rarely below 50%.
  - exmadscientist 9mo ago
    I have never noticed that problem. But I always adjust brightness as part of a full color calibration, with ICC profile and everything, which probably makes a difference. I will say that it took a bit to adjust to the first time I did it, but now it's painful to use any monitor at "full" 200+ nit brightness.

Doches 9mo ago

I’ve noticed this tendency in my own UI work as well: dark designs tend to get darker, and light designs lighter, when updated or refreshed in isolation. Is there a term for this kind of ratcheting effect?

findthewords 9mo ago
Polarization, reflecting the polarization in economics and politics?
AlienRobot 9mo ago
Flanderization?

kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago

The root cause may just be the increase in dead space caused by mobile first UIs.

zerocrates 9mo ago
The author looks like they've only looked at the color of the dead space so probably not significant for this specifically. The trend against skueuomorphism maybe equally relevant: that early example is a descendant of Apple's previous brushed-metal UI. Though even among the flat ones there's been a trend toward lightening. It'd also be interesting to see what area the author picked on each screenshot: a big difference, at least before Tahoe, if you decide that the Finder sidebar or top bar is what you're going to look at.
- willhbr 9mo ago
  I picked the window chrome from Safari or Finder for each version, as similar as I could get to the highlighted area in the screenshot. My intent was to capture the shade of the non-content area in the window.
qball 9mo ago
No. The reason Light Mode has been getting lighter is simple: because the default computer in 2025 is now a laptop or phone, whereas in 2009 it was a desktop. Laptops and phones have easy and relatively coarse brightness adjustment settings for their screens. Desktops didn't, and still don't. So it makes sense that you'd just make whites as bright as possible- if the user doesn't like that, they can just turn the brightness down. Otherwise you're just kind of leaving the monitor's available/potential contrast on the table. Note that Dark Modes skyrocketed in popularity after the default computer changed from being a desktop to a laptop- but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through). The next change to this trend will occur, specifically to Dark Mode, 1-2 years after the average machine a software designer is issued for work has an OLED screen- because OLED screens actually can get that dim, the current color balance will likely be inappropriate.

CharlesW 9mo ago

> Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were… Things people born after Macintosh say.

jonstewart 9mo ago
Exactamundo.
louthy 9mo ago
True. This was how my first computer was [1] I didn’t call it dark mode though! [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Hard_reset_BBC_Micro_32K_Acorn_DFS.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Hard_res...
csense 9mo ago
I spent an enormous amount of time in DOS, color 7 on color 0, gray on black. The IDE everybody used was aggressively gray on blue [1]. Which is #AAAAAA on #000000 to you kids with your fancy Super VGA monitors with megabytes of video memory and 24-bit color. This white background stuff is the invention of Microsoft or somebody's marketing department, who decided people would be less afraid of computers if they made the screen look like a piece of paper. Back in my day we only used 16 colors at a time [2], because you had to quarter the resolution if you wanted more than that, because of course video memory has to fit in a 64k segment -- why would anyone even want to go bigger, wouldn't that consume way too much conventional memory? And if you did decide you wanted to use 8-bit mode, if you wanted square pixels you had to read Michael Abrash's book and do terrible black magic involving directly programming VGA registers and bank-switched bit-planes. If you don't know what any of that means, it means you kids've got it way too easy these days and don't even know it. The real programmers who knew all this stuff and made brilliant masterpieces like Master of Magic and the original X-COM were scattered to the winds when the original Microprose folded. Now get off my lawn. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic#/media/File:QBasic_Opening_Screen.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic#/media/File:QBasic_Open... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#With_an_RGBI_monitor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#With_an...
willhbr 9mo ago

jsheard 9mo ago

In real terms dark modes have gotten darker too, at least on mobile, due to the proliferation of OLEDs with infinite contrast. #000000 went from "the darkest grey the display can manage" to "no light whatsoever".

zerocrates 9mo ago
Also shown on the chart, to a smaller degree. And more noticeable on mobile probably where there's lots of OLEDs and concern about battery usage.

piskov 9mo ago

> My eyes will thank you Sometimes I think the most hate for light mode is from people without autobrightness in their displays. Or from those who don’t know how to change it easily. Sure, if I were to constantly blind myself with 10k lux, I would hate white background too. But it isn’t supposed to be like that: make it the same brightness as the surroundings and voila. I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black. Also with glossy display (like 6k xdr) the only way I can deal with reflections is by always using light mode. Alabaster code theme is my favorite. If you don’t have auto brightness, there are many apps to change it easily via UI or keyboard instead of manual knobs of your monitor — most of them for the past 10 years support control via hdmi/displayport — I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume — every soundtrack should be lounge cafe del mar.” Or “I use this browser extension to make everything 5% loud.” Well, just turn down the volume knob, dummy.

troupo 9mo ago
> I’ve never met a person saying he hates books and wishes they were white on black. Books don't emit light. They reflect it. That's the difference.
- piskov 9mo ago
  It doesn’t matter what the source is (unless you have crt days flicker, bad tn panel polarization or what have you). Irritation comes from the difference in brightness.
  - Krutonium 9mo ago
    Reflection means it's got no difference (or a negligable technically) difference in brightness.
    - orbital-decay 9mo ago
      My mirror disagrees.

imwally 9mo ago

I’m not a big fan of dark mode and I seem to be in the minority these days. Probably 99% of my colleagues at work use dark mode and when I screen share I get the usual “ah, my eyes!” The interesting thing is, I’ve noticed when I read white on black and look elsewhere I see horizontal lines in my vision. So really I’m the one who should be shouting about their eyes. Maybe that’s just me, though? I guess I want my computing experience to be like that of reading a book. Not sure I’d like white text on black paper.

culi 9mo ago
I definitely feel that during the day but have the inverse experience when the sun has set (light mode feels unbearable after dark). I like my code editor to respect my OS which automatically changes from light to dark mode when the sun sets.
- krackers 9mo ago
  Even with flux? Shifting the white point is far more comfortable than dark mode for me. In fact it also matches with the ambient lighting, 4000-6000k during the daytime then 2000-2700k after sunset.
_lnrx 9mo ago
Yeah, I also see the horizontal lines, but only after a while of reading white on black on my phone. But on any devices white on black text appears to me slightly blurry or doubling.
- UltimateEdge 9mo ago
  This is also my experience. Do you have astigmatism?
  - imwally 9mo ago
    Yes, I do!
  - 9mo ago

findthewords 9mo ago

I think that pure white (255) and pure black (0) should be using extremely sparingly. #FFFFFF? Why not #f6f6ef or #eceff4? Lower contrast can improve legibility, too much contrast can hinder it. #000000? Why not #121821, a dark shade of blue? Nothing in real life is perfectly dark. Thankfully HN has remained pleasingly off-white.

piskov 9mo ago
> improve legibility Hilarious how this downvoted comment proves it is not. (Update: it became black again) There should be a special place in hell for those light-grey-text-loving designers.
- pseudalopex 9mo ago
  They did not claim not enough contrast is impossible.
- ziml77 9mo ago
  It's possible to have contrast too low, that doesn't mean maximum contrast is the best. Even HN doesn't go full black on white, the background is off-white.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

throwuxiytayq 9mo ago

Dark mode simply makes sense. Black pixels == no light == no photoreceptor stimulation == the default state. The fact that we used to blast our eyes with near-fully lit displays is a historical artifact of the early days of graphical computer interfaces. I find it annoying (and potentially medically dangerous to some people) that certain actions result in a short white flash while the content is rendered. Mostly happens in web-related apps. Light mode is masochism mode, with just a few exceptions: e-ink, highly lit environments (that are uncomfortable to work in anyways), people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better, and weirdos who enjoy staring at a flashlight. If you're gonna use that, might as well just turn down the screen brightness - but I agree with the author that perhaps a middle ground "gray theme" would be better, if slightly less attractive to UI designers.

krackers 9mo ago
You could equally say "we're evolved to hunt during the daytime, where you scan the environment when the surroundings are bright."
lukeinator42 9mo ago
Light mode constricts your pupil more, which means less eye strain for the eye when focusing because of the better depth of field. Also, black pixels != no light except in technologies such as oled, but most laptops are backlit lcds.
pseudalopex 9mo ago
> people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better Astigmatism is very common.

3rodents 9mo ago

I have stared at a light mode screen for 16 hours a day for 20 years without even the hint of discomfort. 5 minutes of dark mode and my eyes feel someone is shining lasers at me. I have concluded that light mode is for light mode people and dark mode is for dark mode people. Making light mode a little darker or dark mode a little lighter isn’t going to change how people experience interfaces. Make light mode for light people and dark mode for dark mode people. Maybe things are getting brighter, but it hasn’t been noticeable to me.

culi 9mo ago
16 hours a day is a lot. How's your sleep?
csense 9mo ago
Did you ever use CRT monitors or were the computers you used already LCD by the time you were spending significant amounts of time on them? (Gosh, I feel old thinking about the possibility that someone who's been doing this for 20 years might still be too young to have ever used a CRT monitor.)
- layer8 9mo ago
  CRTs had already pretty much fallen out of use as computer monitors in 2006.

itopaloglu83 9mo ago

This isn’t even good design Apple used to known for anymore, making everything glassy and sacrificing the user health is simply asinine. Computers are not meant to be decorations that sit on a shelf, but interacted with all day, and the fact that we’re missing that aspect speaks volumes.

culi 9mo ago

I also feel like there's fewer websites with prominent color schemes/colored backgrounds. I wonder if sites are sticking to light/dark backgrounds more specifically so they can support modern CSS features like `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)`

coffeefirst 9mo ago
Yes! And the designs themselves are being constrained to aesthetics that can look pretty good in light or dark mode.

h1fra 9mo ago

There is something in the air regarding dark mode, lots of people are starting to admit dark mode UI are often harder to read, harder to build, or not worth the effort. Maybe we are past peak dark-mode

420official 9mo ago
A well designed dark mode UI is just as readable as a well designed light mode UI. The issue is a lot of designers design light mode then just try to invert for dark mode rather than actually designing for dark mode. I'd imagine your post would exist for light mode if we had started with dark mode as the default.
- pseudalopex 9mo ago
  > A well designed dark mode UI is just as readable as a well designed light mode UI. This could be correct if astigmatism was rare.[1] [1] https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-accessibility-issues-than-it-solves-54cddf6466f5 https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-access...
- orbital-decay 9mo ago
  A lot of software is dark-mode first but it's still not right. Good dark schemes are just really hard to design, there are just too many nuanced differences. Color perception is maybe 10% of it. Typographics, line thickness, optical balance, accounting for massively increased contrast, antialiasing, layout, picture rendering, absolutely everything should be done differently on dark backgrounds. And it depends too much on your environment, the type of display, and its pixel density, unlike in light mode which is way more forgiving to external factors.
joe_the_user 9mo ago
I think a factor is that when a significant design innovation appears, it has to be reasonably usable to get traction. But changes to an existing paradigm just have to be distinctive. Hence light-mode gets lighter and lighter 'till misery/unusability, dark mode then get something-distinctive until also unusable and people go searching for third way. Kind of a particular instance of enshittification.

orbital-decay 9mo ago

By trying to outsmart your monitor brightness setting and micromanaging it yourself per-app you're killing the consistency. This should be used for relative color schemes in your app, not for micromanaging the brightness. Neutral grey makes sense in two cases: - Relative color schemes in which your elements can be either lighter or darker than the background. - Precise color grading, because white and black backgrounds shift color perception too much. If you feel the background is too bright, either add more light in the room, or reduce the monitor brightness. It's all relative, it physically cannot have too much absolute brightness to hurt your eyes. The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt. What hurts them is excessive contrast: staring at the monitor in the dark room, pure black color schemes on OLED screens, etc. This looks jarring and breaks eye adaptation.

rented_mule 9mo ago
> The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt. It turns out bodies don't all respond the same way to the same stimuli. Sunny days cause me real pain. A thin layer of ground fog with bright sun above it is brutal for me, as is bright sun with snow on the ground. I feel so much more comfortable outside on a dark, cloudy day. My eye doctor tells me she frequently hears the same from others. Each of us has a different response curve to light levels.

wasmperson 9mo ago

I was never a fan of the "Dark Mode"/"Light Mode" trend. "We've added support to our website/application for a whole TWO themes!" Meanwhile: - One of the two themes is always worse, but which one it is is different from application to application - Despite the above, I'm required to decide globally whether I'm a "dark mode" or "light mode" person, with no option to just let the application or website decide on its own which theme is best. - Because designers now need to support inverted contrast everywhere, everything has to be monochrome, including icons, text, backgrounds, etc. I'd honestly rather people just picked one theme and directed their efforts towards making it look as good as possible. Or, you know, add support for real custom theming so I can make it look however I want.

AlienRobot 9mo ago

My hypothesis is that this has to do with the whitening of the UI. Personally I love Windows XP because it's so colorful. The taskbar is blue. The start button is green. The window frame is blue, the close button is red. The sidebars are tinted yellow. Even icons like CD-roms aren't greyscale, but tinted purple instead. Since then, people started removing color from everything. Colorful icons became monochrome, perhaps only so it could be easily switched from "light mode" to "dark mode" by switching their colors from black to white and vice-versa. Everything is now harder to see. On Linux, most attempts to mimic retro GUIs fail because they can't tint different parts internal of a window of different colors, such as tinting only the sidebar a shade of yellow. This is rather ironic given that GTK's CSS theoretically could allow this. But in practice there is no stable public "API" for the classses used inside an application to allow users to re-style them easily with CSS. Even if I could do .sidebar { color: #ff0; }, I don't know the class name that my file manager used for its sidebar, for example, so I can't really do that. In my opinion this the main reason modern UI's feel so bland and lifeless.

genewitch 9mo ago
i have never thought about the fact that prior to win8(?) that windows explorer had different shades for everything. I have thought about the default windows 95/98 themes, as i have painted my bedrooms for 25 years the exact shade of one specific part of the "computer properties" window in win98, "extreme gloss". at night, it's pitch black and during the day, the high-gloss makes it very lively and bright. I can't imagine having some other color for a room i sleep in (the ceiling is white, i'm not a barbarian).

levocardia 9mo ago

I suspect the trend would be even more extreme if multiplied by typical screen brightness over time!

genewitch 9mo ago
i play helldivers 2 on an HDR monitor and i nearly always balk at playing daytime missions because the in game light source "sun" literally hurts my eyes to look at. However, barring that (i mean, midday sun is nearly impossible for me, in real life, too, right?), like websites, the backgrounds look brighter on my 1080p TV i have connected to the computer, even though it is set up for the correct colors, so windows understands that letting webdevs attack my retinas is unacceptable, at least.

whizzter 9mo ago

Comments here lambasting too bright background/letters.. QuickBasic/QBasic/edit.com(and turbo pascal?) darkish blue background and grey text was just damn comfortable and why we turned our backs on it is beyond me.

chr15m 9mo ago

I miss the Apple IIe with its pure orange cathode rays on the pitch black of zero light emission, gently lazing my eyeballs each day as I clacked BASIC into the REPL.

mberning 9mo ago

Interfaces used to be “battle ship grey” which I loved.

jedbrooke 9mo ago

For me there’s something about context that shapes my dark mode vs light mode preference. Code and terminals is dark, documents/web/chat is light. For some reason I can’t stand dark mode slack/discord, but dark mode IDE is preferred. Also, there’s just something about the graph of “Average brightness of MacOS screenshots over the years” and extrapolating it that tickles my brain. By 2030 MacOS light mode will just be a single white rectangle (with a notch). It reminds me of the “Number of youtube videos on the homepage” blog that extrapolates that by 2030 there will be 0 videos on the homepage.

quotemstr 9mo ago

That's adorable. You think light mode is getting too light? Just wait until people figure out the eyeball-searing power of HDR gamut annotations. OLED devices usually keep plenty of nits in reserve in normal operation. Pop in some HDR content and you get the device to pump more photons into the user's eyeball.

pmontra 9mo ago

I use mixed mode: editor and terminal on black background (and US keymap) everything else on white background (and my country keymap.) There is no particular reason for that except habits. I started programming on black background terminals and the first anything else happened on Unix workstations or Windows PCs with white backgrounds. I adjust the overall brightness of my screen according to the light level of the room and I use night mode. When I happen to use some other computer in dark mode it's usually too dark: white characters are often too thin and don't enjoy enough light to be readable. Maybe dark mode is for young eyes or for people that are very sensitive to glare.

satvikpendem 9mo ago

Good. I want FFFFFF and 000000, not any light and dark grays which are just annoying to read. Especially with my OLED monitor, it's amazing to see pure blacks and vivid whites, so much so that I use the Dark Reader extension everywhere and when that doesn't cut it, I use custom stylesheets for certain websites to make the `body { background: black; }`.

eek2121 9mo ago
Agree...mostly. HN Dark mode hack is alright. Legit even. If you have uBlock Origin, add this as a rule: news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter: invert(90%) hue-rotate(180deg); background: white) The result: dark grays/browns without sacrificing the orange header and without breaking inputs like some other stuff I've seen. I do like pure black for most apps, however, it does get boring after a while. Mix in stuff like this on HN or elsewhere to mix things up. Wanting to save battery life is fine and all, however, some things should be fun/entertaining. ;)
- satvikpendem 9mo ago
  Eh I don't want any grays or browns, the black and white and orange theme I get from dark reader is great, actually looks good, even. I also went to the HN settings and set the orange header to 000000 too, haha.
kccqzy 9mo ago
FFFFFF and 000000 are simply too much contrast for my eyes to read comfortably regardless of which is background and which is text. I prefer a background of ECECEC with text being 333333 if I’m in light mode, or the other way around in dark mode. It noticeably causes less discomfort for my eyes.
- layer8 9mo ago
  You can adjust brightness and contrast so that 000000 looks like 333333 and FFFFFF looks like ECECEC. If that’s what feels comfortable to you, arguably that’s how it should be set.

taneq 9mo ago

Light mode decreases the localised dynamic range. Also, screens are way brighter than they used to be. It’s the visual equivalent of the loudness wars in broadcast audio. Is everything is loud/bright then nothing is, but everything is still more exhausting.

Wowfunhappy 9mo ago

> Somewhat in the spirit of Mavericks Forever, if I were to pick an old MacOS design to go back to it would probably be Yosemite. I don’t have any nostalgia for skeuomorphic brushed metal or stitched leather, but I do quite like the flattened design and blur effects that Yosemite brought. Ironically Yosemite was a substantial jump in brightness from previous versions. Author of Mavericks Forever here. I find it very surprising that the author complains about low contrast and then praises Yosemite. Yosemite is absolutely what started this trend, and the lack of contrast is why I hate it. This may not show up in the window chrome specifically, but the broader UI has way less contrast than Aqua. This actually got slightly better in 10.11 (El Capitan) before getting worse again. 10.9 and older are of course the best. Mavericks also has little brushed metal and zero stitched leather. The author is thinking of (Mountain) Lion, and of early iOS, which is much more skeuomorphic. P.S. Fine, you win, I just pushed an update to kill the animations.

kmeisthax 9mo ago

Discord did something similar. Their light mode used to be a lot more reasonable, with the sidebar still grey, then they decided to make it "actually light" because someone complained about it on Twitter. Now it's blindingly white. The white-fest also makes Liquid Glass on macOS basically flat mode with extra steps. Because all the fancy glass refraction effects don't actually do anything if you put them on a solid block of color.

Brajeshwar 9mo ago

My personal choice is kinda split between both modes. I like Light as a default, but prefer Dark for others. For instance, the IDE where I write code is always in the darker mode, but writing normal notes/prose, such as in Obsidian, Apple Notes, is always light. I also prefer the non-primary focus area to be of a darker shade; hence, the sidebar in my Obsidian is usually darker with light text while the main writing area is light (themes/settings does this). However, I prefer Dark Mode on my phone as the default, except for a few specific apps, such as Maps, even at night. I like minimal setup with less text and content during daytime but after sunset, the phone is set to be more pronounced (with labels, etc). I’m 40+ and I like sharper text and higher contrast especially when it is darker (night). Hence, the more pronounced Phone Setup; I should be able to read/know quick enough if I get a Whitelisted call at Night. I like apps that do not force but give me an option to have a choice between Light/Dark. In macOS, to use Dark Theme for Menubar and Dock (the periphery) but overall Light Theme for the main content, here is how to do it; 1. Go to System Preferences, then set the theme to LIGHT. 2. In Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool Yes` 3. Logout, then System Preferences, then set the theme to DARK If you wish to reset back to the default, in Terminal, run `defaults write -g NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool No`

ranger207 9mo ago

Personally I like dark mode because most of the time my screen isn't looking at things that are majority pure white, it's looking at games, or videos, or blogs with a background color, or whatever. If I adjust my brightness to see relatively dark things comfortably, then things in light mode are now too bright. But since I look at more things that aren't pure white than pure white I adjust for the more common use case. The increase in blank space in UIs and the trend towards less color and differentiation have made the number of things where light mode is unbearable too high.

amluto 9mo ago

This has some questionable methodology. image = Image.open(file) greyscale = image.convert('L') stat = ImageStat.Stat(greyscale) avg_lightness = int(stat.mean[0]) That’s a non-gamma-corrected average, which generally doesn’t give good results. But also: > What I’ve graphed here is just the brightness of the window chrome, which isn’t really representative of the actual total screen brightness. No kidding. Also, Mac OS keeps changing the chrome, and this isn’t obviously a very useful measurement.

rendaw 9mo ago

I think the introduction of the "light mode" "dark mode" distinction actually made things worse. As a designer, before you had the whole spectrum to work with so you could have dark areas in light areas in dark areas, etc. Now, if you start with thinking "I'm working on a light-mode theme" you're suddenly restricted to only half the gamut for backgrounds, and you end up spreading things out more within that (more white, in order to contrast the slightly darker white). Plus you need to make it visually distinct from "dark mode" which means you're probably aiming for less than 50% gamut. I think it's a mental trap. Edit: And it's made worse by the fact that browsers now have built in light/dark mode preferences, standardizing this framing. So if you create something that doesn't fit in the light/dark boxes, you worry about users complaining of you not respecting their browser preferences.

walterbell 9mo ago

"Is Dark Mode Good for Your Eyes" (2020), 300 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33947820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33947820

adius 9mo ago

I use light mode during the day and dark mode in the evening, with the OS switching automatically based on the sun’s position. To me, this seems like the obvious way to decide when to use dark mode, but apparently I’m in a very small minority.

genewitch 9mo ago
i let my devices attempt to enforce this. Windows goes one further by automatically dimming my displays at a set time (it defaults to like 19:00 or 20:00). I wish my phone did this too, but i haven't found a way to have it do dim and undim automatically. anyhow if you read between the lines in many of the comments (above this one at this time), i get the idea that most people would answer "it depends" and the people who like light mode either have properly set up their display (130 nits was mentioned), people who have astigmatisms (mentioned), or people who don't know there's anything else.