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.”
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 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.
Seconding this, light themes cripple syntax highlighting, which in turn makes it far more annoying to quickly scan through code and glean structure. You can make up for this to some degree with text decorations, but, well, with dark schemes you have that too.
Feels like a difference in mental structures. Without robust syntax coloring, parsing code is considerably more difficult for me. In more human terms it feels kind of like trying to communicate without being able to use adjectives or something.
This is a pretty awful post, the problem is his example uses a horrible syntax highlighting scheme that makes use of far too few colours and no other text decorations.
In a competent highlighting scheme, you have enough differentiation that every distinct type of thing indeed has a different way it pops.
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 think that reinforces their point if anything. With reflected light, you have a natural, inherent form of auto-brightness because the amount of light coming off the page depends on the amount of light in the room.
Books are not designed to reproduce colors though, and monitors are. If you have aggressive auto-brightness settings, that wouldn't actually make a monitor appear more like a book, it would just make it so the stuff that is actually supposed to look blisteringly white is merely mild. Which, sure, is an improvement for eye strain, but it's more of a workaround than a solution, and since it would muck up color reproduction a lot of users couldn't do this all the time anyways.
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.
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.
> 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.
Interesting how experiences differ. I've found dark mode contrast to generally be a bit better than that of light mode because for some reason designers tend to employ a wider spread of colors with a higher delta between the lightest and darkest in those, whereas light mode themes tend to be stark white and two grays tops with those grays barely getting used at all.
So for example it's common for group boxes in dark mode to get a dedicated background color where under light mode they won't have a background and all and fall through the the parent's white background, causing content to all kind of blur together.
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 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...
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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)`
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
No. 70% white backgrounds allowed light and dark contrast elements. 100% white backgrounds do not.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
Seconding this, light themes cripple syntax highlighting, which in turn makes it far more annoying to quickly scan through code and glean structure. You can make up for this to some degree with text decorations, but, well, with dark schemes you have that too.
> because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme.
That’s why I mentioned alabaster: the only thing it highlights is comments and constants.
Nowadays I can’t stand “normal” themes even for a minute: they are like blinking Christmas lights for me, too much distraction.
Imaging reading the book where each word has different colors for nouns, verbs, what have you — nuts! :-)
Feels like a difference in mental structures. Without robust syntax coloring, parsing code is considerably more difficult for me. In more human terms it feels kind of like trying to communicate without being able to use adjectives or something.
It took a couple of days 10+ years ago to see what the fuss is about (I was an avid “christmas-lighter” before), and I never came back.
Also check this: https://tonsky.me/blog/syntax-highlighting/
This is a pretty awful post, the problem is his example uses a horrible syntax highlighting scheme that makes use of far too few colours and no other text decorations.
In a competent highlighting scheme, you have enough differentiation that every distinct type of thing indeed has a different way it pops.
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.
Have you tried high-CRI LEDs? I find that they are much closer to the incandescent lighting feel.
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 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 he hates books and wishes they were white on black.
Books don't emit light. They reflect it. That's the difference.
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.
Reflection means it's got no difference (or a negligable technically) difference in brightness.
I think that reinforces their point if anything. With reflected light, you have a natural, inherent form of auto-brightness because the amount of light coming off the page depends on the amount of light in the room.
Books are not designed to reproduce colors though, and monitors are. If you have aggressive auto-brightness settings, that wouldn't actually make a monitor appear more like a book, it would just make it so the stuff that is actually supposed to look blisteringly white is merely mild. Which, sure, is an improvement for eye strain, but it's more of a workaround than a solution, and since it would muck up color reproduction a lot of users couldn't do this all the time anyways.
The retina can't tell the difference between reflected light and emitted light
Unless you're in the habit of reading your books with a flashlight, the context makes it very different.
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.
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.
> 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.
Interesting how experiences differ. I've found dark mode contrast to generally be a bit better than that of light mode because for some reason designers tend to employ a wider spread of colors with a higher delta between the lightest and darkest in those, whereas light mode themes tend to be stark white and two grays tops with those grays barely getting used at all.
So for example it's common for group boxes in dark mode to get a dedicated background color where under light mode they won't have a background and all and fall through the the parent's white background, causing content to all kind of blur together.
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.
This is also my experience. Do you have astigmatism?
Yes, I do!
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...
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.
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.
Get checked for astigmatism. 100% you have it
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.
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.)
16 hours a day is a lot. How's your sleep?
> 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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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)`
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.
> 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.
I wonder how much brighter (nits) screens have become over the same period as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The root cause may just be the increase in dead space caused by mobile first UIs.
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.
> 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.
No. 70% white backgrounds allowed light and dark contrast elements. 100% white backgrounds do not.
>Laptops and phones have easy and relatively coarse brightness adjustment settings for their screens. Desktops didn't, and still don't.
You know what sucks? They do. Desktops do. They have since the late 90s.
Microsoft just never implemented it. Most desktop displays happily respond to brightness commands from the OS over DDCCI.
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.
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?
Polarization, reflecting the polarization in economics and politics?
Flanderization?
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.
I suspect the trend would be even more extreme if multiplied by typical screen brightness over time!
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
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.
> 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-access...
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> improve legibility
Hilarious how this downvoted comment proves it is not.
There should be a special place in hell for those light-grey-text-loving designers.
They did not claim not enough contrast is impossible.
Interfaces used to be “battle ship grey” which I loved.
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.
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.
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.
> people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better
Astigmatism is very common.
You could equally say "we're evolved to hunt during the daytime, where you scan the environment when the surroundings are bright."