There’s plenty of research about the fatigue and damage caused by displays, with brightness being a factor. Most displays I’ve used, at the lowest brightness, will still be fatiguing. The human eye has never been exposed to this much direct light at close quarters, lots of it being in the blue+ parts of the spectrum.

Needing light themes to offset display reflections seems like a very good case of form over function. Nano-texture Apple displays largely address that, but then they’re much more expensive. The idiocy of fashion-driven design…

Aside from the LG Ultrafine, I’ve never owned an external monitor with auto-brightness.

Example meta reviews:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12886-024-03721-1

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9434525/

Not everybody own $4k monitors, so automatic brightness isn’t always available.

Regardless though, due to the design inconsistencies of the system, one screen is too bright that causes to reduce the brightness and another one uses literally 1/1,000,000 contrast difference between tabs to distinguish the active one, so it’s impossible to get a base brightness correct.

I’m using a MacBook Pro M4 and as I move around the house, automatic brightness either tries to blind me despite I’ve been in a dark room for a minute, or simply refuses to turn the brightness up when the sun is shining down into the room. It’s certainly designed for a certain environment, but not definitely a home.

I'm writing this comment at night, on my phone with its absolute lowest brightness; it is still too bright.

Maybe, just maybe, people aren't "holding it wrong"

Unlike screens produced light. To make them the same brightness as ambient would make them unreadable in my current situation. Yet a black background is much more pleasant. Why? Because the light being produced is less. You're right that the contrast matters. Black background and white text gets us closer to ambient light level while providing contrast. You simply cannot do same with black text on white background. I mean go to a dark room, put down the phone and ask yourself what the natural background is. It's black. That's the ambient level

I use both auto (when available) and manual brightness adjustments, and the environment in which I do most of my computing gets ample natural light.

The problem persists, however, because as the linked posts notes light mode is far brighter than it used to be, and now if I crank brightness down low enough to feel comfortable I'm sacrificing contrast and color vividness to such a degree that (for me) it's actively distracting. So, dark mode on high brightness it is.

For code editing, I've always tended towards dark themes ever since they became readily available in IDEs in the late 2000s simply because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme. When I use a light theme for code editing it feels almost like staring at a sheet of undifferentiated text in comparison.

> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.

I've never seen a book actually radiate its own light. Perhaps if there had been 600+ sq. inch self illuminating books, we might have invented dark mode long ago.

During the early days of CRTs, dark mode was the norm. VT50/100/220, 3270 etc. were almost always dark with illuminated characters, and even when not, they were only ~12-14" diagonal, and there was only one. Most PC/DOS machines were the same. The moment raster displays appeared, everything went "light mode," but they still weren't very large. Then, displays got huge and multiplied, easily able to overwhelm human eyes with excessive power.

The ~30-year detour into Apple/Microsoft's paper-mimicry is ending due to basic ergonomics. No need for your tut-tutting.

No, it isn't. Making your entire screen dark for all content isn't a solution for a dumb GUI color scheme.

"Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine."

Several incorrect statements there. "Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible. The opposite was called "inverse." The Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 computers (and possibly others) even had dedicated keys that toggled between regular and inverse text; it is called that in the manual.

Word even had a checkbox option in it entitled "Blue background, white text." It wasn't removed until 2007, concurrent with lots of other UI regressions in Windows. Microsoft also removed the color-scheme editor from Windows, with which people had been able to set up global color schemes (including "dark" ones) since 1991.

When people finally realized how dumb it is to read dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, companies had to run around slapping hard-coded "dark modes" onto everything... after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac.

So how did we end up suffering through decades of inverse GUIs? I've always attributed it to

1. The "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s / early '90s, which sought to make the screen analogous to a piece of paper.

2. The Mac, which imitated Xerox's GUI, which was inverse. Possibly related to #1.

3. Windows defaulting to an inverse scheme (although it provided a way to easily change the global scheme), as it imitated the Mac.

It's probably also because a lot of people sit in rooms which are poorly lit. Part of it is probably because it's really hard to establish proper lighting with modern LEDs. This is anecdotal, but our lamps haven't really changed in the way they are designed, We now have six lamps where we had three before, and there is still "less" light in our living room because LED's create and emit light differently.

I usually work with darkmode at home, and light mode in the office because our office is basically the surface of the sun.

I’m personally a high fan of light mode, and rarely use dark mode. That being said, the comparison with paper isn’t very apt. LCDs produce their own light, and OLEDS exacerbate the difference by only emitting light for the background, and none for the text. It’s very different from using ambient reflected light.

If you take a non backlight e-ink display and put it next to a light mode OLED with the same brightness as the environment, the difference is (slight pun intended) night and day. There’s no configuration possible on my phone to make it more legible than a book it sits next to in low light conditions.

Also after years of having light mode only Phrasing, I recently added a dark mode. Not to look cool in dark mode, but because it’s often the first thing I use in the morning and last think I use at night. After a year of minim-brightness still-squinting at the screen, it was truly remarkable the physical difference a #000 background made in the dark with an OLED screen.

   > I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.

I absolutely agree about setting brightness correctly, though. It's very usual for me to instantly reduce brightness whenever I have to use someone's computer. No idea how people use their screens so bright.

>I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.

I love books. But I also have a brain-vision disability that makes it so that I physically struggle to read black text on a white background.

If I could get books inverted, I would.

> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.

Wow. This is the most insightful statement I've read today.

It's finally clicked [U+2014] why I prefer e-ink to hardback, in spite of the alluring texture of plup across fingers.

It's because it should've been white-on-black, not black-on-white. It makes so much intuitive sense.

Autobrightness only works for screens which are against a wall. Your eyes care about what is behind the screen, not in front of it, and that’s one thing autobrightness never took into account.

I used to jailbreak my iPhone 4s to get some dark mode.

The pages in books are a range of colours, very few are gloss white. I've just flicked through a few on my shelf; the whitest book I have is the wiring regs and they are notably less white than my wife's artists paper. Most of my books are a kind of murky brown not too dissimilar in mental feel to the HN background.

> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.

Plenty of books are printed non-bleached paper, which is more of a cream color, to reduce the contrast and reflectivity of the background.

If you turn down the brightness, the background and text will become more similar in color, as both will move closer to black.

A dark background reduces total brightness without that effect.

> 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.

> I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume

Volume and loudness are different things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) and pervasive loudness is absolutely a thing. Just turning down the volume doesn’t fix dynamic range compression.

I find dark mode incredibly straining in most daytime and office situations, particularly with glossy screens. Do use it exclusively in dark environments though.

The ‘anti light-mode’ sentiment has been around for more than a decade, but the reason why it’s not default is because it doesn’t suit the majority of users’ needs or use cases.

Anecdotally, I’ve found that the strongest proponent of dark mode in my professional career tended to be people who worked exclusively at night, or those who aspired to emulate the ‘late night hacker’ trope.

Your team might be an anomaly. I get the sense that dark mode people are a vocal minority. I see people share their screen constantly at work and I can probably count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen with dark mode. Actually, I can only recall 2, and one of them was an intern from 10+ years ago.

If the majority was using dark mode, I’d imagine we’d see operating systems show dark mode as their default screenshots and ship as the default. We don’t see that.

When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.

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.

I also see the horizontal lines.

I guess it's like looking at a slatted window blind with a sunny day behind it, when you look away your eyes will see the remnants of the bright lines. Whereas if you're staring at a bright surface (a screen on light mode), the entire scope of vision is dimmed...

The only time I preferred light mode was as when I was on vacation in Florida and worked out of a sun room. I find myself normally working in low light environments which makes dark mode better overall. But it doesn’t have to be black background in fact I like the other “dark themes” that are darker shades of blue

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.

Get checked for astigmatism. 100% you have it

same here. sometimes it makes me feels guilty for using light mode. Maybe we should yell out something like "hold-on can't see anything"

16 hours a day is a lot. How's your sleep?

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.)

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_res...

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_Open...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#With_an...

Yep the first OS I (the author) used was the delightful beige of Windows 98

>> 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.

Things people born after teleprompters say.

Exactamundo.

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.

I agree for text content, but not for UI chrome and UI controls and forms/dialogs. Background color is useful to distinguish between UI and content.

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. ;)

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Polarization, reflecting the polarization in economics and politics?

Flanderization?

> 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.

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.

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.

You could equally say "we're evolved to hunt during the daytime, where you scan the environment when the surroundings are bright."

> people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better

Astigmatism is very common.