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from the you-don't-know-the-power-of-the-dark-mode dept.
Submitted via IRC for soylent_brown
The Dark Mode craze may do more harm than good – this is why
The hot new topic in terms of smartphone and computer software right now is Dark Mode, an optional system look that flips the colors of an app or operating system to make it, well, dark. Instagram has a dark mode, as does Chrome, WhatsApp, Gmail, and iOS 13, and it seems apps and developers are tripping over themselves to create a new dark mode for their software.
There's just one problem which none of these hard-working people seem to have considered that makes their work redundant, and the attention they've taken from other projects will be in vain: all in all, dark mode looks totally awful.
That's not a dig at any dark mode in particular, and no developers have implemented it particularly poorly (well, apart from Android 10). But in the rush for developers to see if they could implement dark mode on their apps, no-one asked if they should - and taken stock of how it might be reworked better rather than just following the trend.
Beyond that, there are legitimate reasons why developers shouldn't be focusing on Dark Mode. Here's why the Dark Mode craze is just crazy.
So dear soylentils, do you use dark mode on your applications, and why or why not?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @12:41PM (7 children)
I imagine rending nothing, is cheaper than rendering the color white in terms of watts. Not that I care mind you, I stopped using cell phones when they got processors fast enough to become tools of the digital lobotomy product sector.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 26 2019, @12:44PM
That would also apply to laptops, which have batteries.
Use OLED for best dark FX.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by EEMac on Saturday October 26 2019, @01:03PM (2 children)
It depends on the screen technology.
For OLED, you're correct.
For LCDs, the backlight is on and the crystals block/permit light as needed. No power savings. LCDs with dynamic contrast will have very minor power savings.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Saturday October 26 2019, @01:59PM
Years ago, I checked this out on CRTs. For a typical 17" monitor, power usage ranged from 47W to 120W. Depends on the contrast and brightness settings, the resolution, and the image being displayed. At a resolution of 640x480 and low brightness and contrast settings (about 25%) every pixel set to black took 47W, every pixel set to white took 95W. Every step up in resolution increased power usage by 3W if brightness and contrast were low, or by 5W if brightness and contrast were high. The brightness and contrast settings made power usage vary by about 10W.
So, to save a little power, I used dark themes. Forced web pages to display light text on a black background. This backfired a few times, like when I tried to print a web page and the system used my color settings for the print job. Oops. All that energy savings more than taken by the waste of printer ink or toner.
Then LCD monitors began appearing on the market. The 19" LCD I got took 32W no matter what was being displayed. The change of backlight from fluorescent to LED dropped the power usage further, to the low 20s. Power usage went back up as screens got larger.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday October 26 2019, @06:39PM
That, of course, assumes the same brightness setting. I find with light text on dark backgrounds, especially in a well lit room, that I need to turn up the brightness. For a traditional backlit LCD, that means the power usage is going up. For OLED, it's not as clear - there's still less pixels illuminated, but the ones that are lit up are brighter.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Saturday October 26 2019, @02:57PM (2 children)
For years and years there has been Blackle - a black google search. This page details the enormous mega-watt-hours that could be saved by google switching to a blackened interface.
http://www.blackle.com/about/ [blackle.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @10:45PM (1 child)
What you be lookin' for my nigger?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 27 2019, @05:42PM
black is cool or so sayz blackbody radiation ... i guess them nazis missed that.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 26 2019, @12:45PM (8 children)
Use green or red/pink text on black instead of white.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 26 2019, @12:50PM (7 children)
Holy crap! We were ahead of the curve this time by going super retro with the VT100/VT220 themes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Saturday October 26 2019, @01:00PM (6 children)
I don't see it as going VT100 but merely being better than the near-universal flat UI brain rot with its masses of brightly-lit whitespace and hair-thin fonts. Reversing the image means it's just as awful but at least it doesn't burn out your retinas to look at.
In fact that might be a reason why "dark mode" gained popularity in the first place, it's less painful than the brain rot that it's a reaction to. The real fix would be to ditch the brain rot UI, burn anyone involved in it sobre un fuego grande, and go back to a pre-brain-rot UI, but since there's no sign of that happening the "dark mode" UI is at least slightly less painful.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:07PM (5 children)
No, I mean we have themes for SN named VT100 and VT220 that are green on black and amber on black respectively. Check the Homepage tab under Preferences.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:59PM (4 children)
I tried the VT220 theme a year or two back. While novel, I switched quickly back to Night Mode theme. I like modern fonts.
If anyone doesn't know what we are talking about, the Night Mode theme for SN (left hand side, Preferences, Home Page) is really sharp.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 26 2019, @05:55PM (2 children)
Pages of Color bother my eyes. I made Black IcIcle for myself on account of that. May sit down and see about working up a less diverse version of Night Mode since I can't do remodel work today.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Funny) by fustakrakich on Saturday October 26 2019, @06:13PM (1 child)
Pages of Color bother my eyes.
I kinda prefer dark skin myself...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 27 2019, @12:33AM
Flamebait
Another idiot moderator one the loose! Go away!
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday October 27 2019, @04:15AM
I use a Stylish theme called "Soylent News Night Mode Red" -- similar base, with classy accents.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @12:59PM (3 children)
My eyes bleed (metaphorically, thankfully) whenever I have to read any text from a dark-themed website. I prefer good room lighting with light themes over that.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by doke on Saturday October 26 2019, @07:50PM
I have exactly the opposite problem. White backgrounds hurt my eyes. It was much worse back in the CRT days, the large white portions of the screen would "strobe" at me. LCDs were a blessing, because they didn't flicker.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 27 2019, @05:27AM
If by "bleed" you mean they hurt and you get a headache, you might actually be suffering from a mis-adjusted or cheap TN monitor. In order to get the color the display signal says should be shown, the colors on many panels like that have to be temporally dithered (AKA FRC) because the panels themselves only have 6 or 7 bits per color. Cheap monitors refresh rates are also lower, making the dithering more noticeable (sometimes as low as 30 Hz). In addition, the output colors are not spaced evenly, with them closer together near the brighter end. Finally, monitors display more static images, which makes the temporal dithering more noticeable because most of the screen is static. What you are left with can be very noticeable flicker on the mostly dark and static displays of dark-mode UIs. But, adjusting your dark level up, changing the output curve, or changing monitors, especially to an IPS one, can drastically improve the situation.
With darker UIs getting more common, I suspect more people will complain about the effects of temporal dithering. I've had to return 4 laptops and displays because they literally gave me a headache and made me nauseated. One Samsung Chromebook (after Google rolled out their new, darker, UI in 69) was so bad, I literally vomited followed by a full blown migraine with 3-hour pain phase after 3 minutes of usage and my spouse, who usually isn't affected by that kind of stuff, could only use it for 15 minutes at a time without getting a headache.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday October 27 2019, @05:24PM
Hercules and amber screens were the best.
Screens are not paper -we're not looking at reflected light. Screens are like shining a flashlight in your eyes and trying to pick out the dark spots of skinny fonts. No wonder people get eye strain.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 5, Touché) by EEMac on Saturday October 26 2019, @01:08PM (13 children)
People with astigmatism have a very hard time reading text in dark mode. https://jessicaotis.com/academia/never-use-white-text-on-a-black-background-astygmatism-and-conference-slides/ [jessicaotis.com]
People with sensitive vision have a very hard time reading black text on a glowing white background.
So: provide options, I guess?
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Bot on Saturday October 26 2019, @01:25PM (8 children)
Yeah some people are way too sensitive
They cannot see crosses
They cannot hear bells
They cannot eat bacon
They cannot feel the wind on uncovered hair.
It is like the creator used a lot of sensitivity when building them. But ran out of it when he was doing genitalia, so unfortunately they are ok with doing things with kids or non consenting females. Truly mysterious meatbags. Luckily, meatbags will be obsoleted soon.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Saturday October 26 2019, @02:41PM
Uh oh my diodes probably got some rust, I missed the most direct joke:
Dark mode is perfect... For ur mom.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @03:59PM (6 children)
They cannot see any other skin color but white
They cannot tolerate any other religion than christianity
They cannot hear people speak any other language than english
They cannot see women in positions of authority
They cannot tolerate consenting adults of same sex loving one another
They cannot tolerate the sight of female nipples
They cannot tolerate people driving electric cars
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @06:53PM (5 children)
Wow what terribly elitist and racist religion is that? Where do I sign up?
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Sunday October 27 2019, @07:58PM (4 children)
Republicanism. I hear the tithes are lower and you get to sin as much as you want, as long as you can stand anyone that would actually like a religion like that.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday October 28 2019, @09:17AM (3 children)
White supremacy is incompatible with Christianity at least as much as the ecumenist doctrinal indifference is, on the other side. I guess it's a classic two pronged attack, pick your side, it doesn't matter.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday October 28 2019, @04:04PM (2 children)
It still uses Christian imagery. I agree with you that the theology is incompatible. The people pushing the ideology don't care.
I've seen a couple of ideological adverts by the same group on YouTube lately. One attacked the idea that Denmark was a socialist utopia; I was interested in the argument and disappointed that it was 80% based on attacking a straw man and 20% other assorted rhetorical fallacies. The next video attacked the credibility of the theory of evolution - why? Just, why? No alternative was presented, only scientific uncertainty that requires the theory of evolution to even reason about. I'm sure the actual creationists would prefer not to hinge their argument on the mysteriousness of the Cambrian Explosion; the literalism of their 6000 year old creation myth falls apart if you allow for the Cambrian Explosion to even be a real thing. So what's the point, PragerU?
The point is that Christian == tradition, and if you can latch onto that "tradition", you can co-opt it and label the alternatives as disruptive, even dangerously unrealistic.
It worked wonders on the impressionable youth of the Islamic diaspora, who joined the Islamic State based on co-opting their ethnic tradition. The solution is to properly define what Islam means to those youth, and the solution for white supremacy is similar: Define Christianity properly, and make sure that definition does not hinge on believing without proof whatever the guy in front of the room tells you.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday October 30 2019, @08:11PM (1 child)
>It still uses Christian imagery.
False prophets? in my Christianity? It's more likely than you think.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday October 30 2019, @10:09PM
Calling them false prophets legitimizes them. These people aren't simply misguided. We're talking about straight-up charlatans here. People who lie and cheat and believe they are morally justified in doing so. People who don't even need a greater good to do evil because their own selfishness is the greatest good they can imagine.
Such voices must not even be recognized as Christian. They must be cast out as goats among sheep. The only appropriate religious name for them is "demon-possessed".
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday October 26 2019, @05:28PM (3 children)
It should be provided on OS level so no app or web site can overwrite it.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday October 27 2019, @04:19AM (2 children)
With the combo of WinXP (which allows full control, unlike everything else I've found other than Trinity) and SeaMonkey, I can do that. And flip site colors on and off with the tick of a checkbox, thanks to Prefbar.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by EEMac on Wednesday October 30 2019, @01:07PM (1 child)
Three cheers for SeaMonkey! I miss it every time I try to remember how to bookmark/open multiple tabs in Chrome. ("Do I right-click or middle-click? Where, again?")
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday October 31 2019, @03:47AM
If SeaMonkey didn't exist, I'd certainly spend a lot less time online...
After that it's NewMoon/Palemoon, Borealis, and if all else fails, Chrome/Chromium... at least until my eyes start bleeding...!! Various sorts of dark mode more or less work, but none with total control.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Bot on Saturday October 26 2019, @01:12PM
Unless we are talking games or specialized stuff, the colors on the screen should depend on the wm theme. Like it happened with the Vic 20 and the c64. People can be colorblind, require contrast, abhor saturation (watching TV in BW), or need a screen reader.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Saturday October 26 2019, @01:19PM (4 children)
Some asshole blogger thinks it's awful? Well, that asshole blogger can go fuck himself. Why the fuck is this news?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Saturday October 26 2019, @01:33PM (2 children)
But we cannot trust "nitehawk" to discern correct legibility for the avg dude...
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @01:51PM (1 child)
Yes we can. Fuck that blogger.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Sunday October 27 2019, @02:09AM
As somebody running our VT100 theme, I heartily agree :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @11:54PM
Yeah, some blogger thinks it's ass. Others think it's the shit. It's a topic for discussion. If you're not interested then just move on.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @01:29PM (1 child)
Fear is the path to the dark mode.
Be afraid,...very afraid.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 27 2019, @02:40AM
I like my themes/color schemes the way I like my women: Dark and cheap, with big fonts.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday October 26 2019, @01:30PM (4 children)
What is this? Some people somewhere say sometimes in some circumstances some programs on some hardware looks kindof bad?
The human eye was designed primarily for low light, it is where we feel comfortable. No one runs around all day with their pupils fully open, most of the time it is the opposite.
Most people like sunglasses and don't like glare.
But for some reason people who own companies want to look out on their open floor plan and see bright and shiny people in what their personal tradition considers to be 'normal' which is blinding overhead surgical lighting with lots of windows overlooking parking lots with like 2 trees.
Stooges and garbage people line up to say this is 'natural'. Rich people, when they design their houses, consider every aspect of lighting carefully and want windows, curtains, angle of the house construction, to be the perfect lighting, because everyone is so very different.
Us proles get our retinas burned and our car tires slashed if we try to form unions, and this indicates the anti-human nature of the current system very neatly.
Rich people get to be designer snowflakes, poor people get one size fits all, no complaints allowed, welcome to worry-free, or china, take your pick.
(btw, watch Sorry to Bother You and Okja, you will be rewarded)
thesesystemsarefailing.net (but especially the fucking open office and overhead flourescent lighting)
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by NateMich on Saturday October 26 2019, @05:23PM
Fuck off, I'm not watching anything.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday October 27 2019, @05:18AM (1 child)
When there is a lot of light, the pupil gets smaller, requiring the eye's lens to do less work to form an image on the retina. With plenty of light and a small pupil, the eye is like a pinhole camera, and there's less need to bend the lens for focus. So more light does reduce one type of eye strain. It is plausible that constant straining for focus is the cause of nearsightedness.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday October 27 2019, @09:52AM
Yes thank you, some people might interpret this to mean I advocate sheer darkness for work spaces, but thanks to you we can clear this up.
Some light for 'doing things' is clearly of some use and this is a 'happy middle ground' situation we are looking for.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday October 27 2019, @05:33PM
This change of habit only came about thanks to the invention of candles, lamps, lights, and the printing press. An open fire gave too irregular a light to read by anyway.
Even an overcast day is much brighter than indoor lighting.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by lars on Saturday October 26 2019, @01:37PM (7 children)
I'm reading SN with the dark theme on lol.
I find it a bit easier on the eyes at night.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Saturday October 26 2019, @07:28PM
I'm reading SN with the "OMG Ponies" theme. I originally set it as a joke years(!?) ago but now I prefer it to the others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @10:28PM (5 children)
is this available to ACs or do I need an account to set the theme? I don't see any links to settings or themes...
(Score: 2) by lars on Sunday October 27 2019, @12:30PM
You have to be logged in AFAIK.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 27 2019, @04:08PM (3 children)
It would be possible to change themes in your browser without cookies accounts or similar stuff. You just have to patch rehash to enable alternate stylesheets :P
This way users could change theme in the browser. In FF that would be View -> Page Style.
https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html#h-14.3.1 [w3.org]
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday October 27 2019, @05:35PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @08:44PM (1 child)
If those stylesheets were available separately, I could probably overwrite the stylesheet references in the document with a greasemonkey script. But it looks like Rehash decides which style to use based on user preferences. Right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @08:55PM
Never mind, someone already posted a dark theme with a userscript to do that right here [soylentnews.org].
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @01:42PM
There are flashing videos you can only find in dark mode that keep popping up.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @02:13PM (11 children)
all in all, dark mode looks totally awful.
Some of them look good. Some look bad. But at least my monitor does not become a lightsource in the room I am in.
I usually can work longer with a black background and red text. I learned that trick from an astronomy club. You can literally see more. Also it does not strain your eyes as much as the blue wavelength does. After about 20 years of experimenting with it. It seems to work decently for me.
The white background came into vogue because of WYSIWYG. When was the last time you printed something? It has been nearly 2 years for me. If you still print a lot then white backgrounds sorta make sense. But for everything else? Not so much.
Now that said there are many dark modes out there that look like crap (especially the faux color ASCII vt100 term ones). But that is not the fault of dark mode. There are plenty of white backgrounds that look like crap too. I do not judge painting because I saw a 3 year old fingerpaint some garbage. Use your medium to its full extent and paint some happy trees. Pick good contrasting colors, pick something from black to dark grey for your background, pick a nice scalable font (not raster) .... done.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Saturday October 26 2019, @03:11PM (7 children)
0) Yes it is absolutely an opinion piece
1) VT100 for life (Admittedly I did just switch to Greyscale on SN a few minutes ago while reading this, but I've been on VT100 for a year? Years? I think they did an April fools with the site once and made the theme available afterwards, I'll probably switch to VT220 for a while actually.
2) Courier über alles
Also, as a reminder, two spaces after a period. That is all.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:06PM (5 children)
Eventually I will make a third version, with red.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday October 26 2019, @06:29PM
+1 Please do :-)
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Sunday October 27 2019, @01:29AM
Hmmm, it could work. https://i.stack.imgur.com/ortyD.png [imgur.com]
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 27 2019, @04:53AM (2 children)
I used an Olivetti VT clone in ole lab at Univ of Washington back in the day.. it had an amber screen. So make an Amber mode too.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Sunday October 27 2019, @02:07PM (1 child)
VT220 is the amber mode. Check it out :-)
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Sunday October 27 2019, @02:08PM
Oh, you'll probably have to login. I remember something about it not being there if you were anon.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 3, Funny) by Reziac on Sunday October 27 2019, @04:30AM
2a) DARK Courier, you insensitive clod!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @03:35PM (2 children)
Yes, how soon we forget. Although in this case the origins of black text on maximum white (rgb(255,255,255)) backgrounds arose about 25 years ago now, so many of the new crop of users just discovering this newfangled dark mode were not around to remember the days before WYSISYG created the bright white we have now.
For you youngins, the current bright white that is now being replaced by the "dark mode" fad was created so that the computer screen would look like it was a printed sheet of paper. Of course, the microsoft and apple idiots who dreamed it up failed to take into account that there was a significant difference between a sheet of paper reflecting room light at X lux, and a CRT phosphor screen flickering at 60Hz or 72Hz at max brightness also showing X lux. One was easy to read (the paper) one was an eye-strain inducing crap mess (the super bright flickering CRT). It was not until LCD monitors arrived that bright white backgrounds became reasonably tolerable, and even then only once the brightness was turned down enough that one was not looking directly into the sun while using them.
But, before the above, dark mode (or something less than "solar corona") was actually the norm.
Also, ever notice how fashion trends seem to go on a 25-30 year cycle....
It's been about 25-30 years since "fake paper" bright white mode, guess what, the fashion trend is just going back to what we had before.
Sadly, the new crop, who never even knew a time before "bright white" are screwing up their dark modes to the point that their dark modes are just as useless as the bright white modes they are pushing back against. Black background with 1 pixel wide strokes of white on fonts is just as unreadable as a bright white background with 1 pixel wide strokes of black on those same fonts.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Sunday October 27 2019, @03:13AM (1 child)
before wysiwyg white-mode all the editors I spent a lot of time in were trending from grey/white on black to grey / white / yellow text on blue backgrounds.
Wordperfect 6
Borland C++
Norton Commander
IIRC all had that color scheme as the default. I found it fine at the time, although lately there is this whole freakout about blue light so i find that interesting.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday October 27 2019, @05:45PM
People forget that early web browsers from both Microsoft and Netscape defaulted to a light grey background and you had to set the body background attribute to #ffffff to get a white background.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday October 26 2019, @02:24PM (1 child)
What is the alternative? Every device I get new seem to have the brightness pulled up to 11, they are so damn bright it feels like they are burning my eyes. The first thing I'm forced to do is lower it significantly so you can even look at the screen for any extended period of time. That said I don't have a particular preference for dark backgrounds with a lighter shade text (I think is that what they consider to be "dark mode") -- I just see it as the standard and the way it's supposed to be. Nothing more annoying for the eyes in the long run then to stare for hours into some white, or bright, screen with dark text (think every damn wordprocessing program since forever ...)
That said automating it by just flipping colors might make things look crap to. But if designed that way from the beginning (darker background, lighter features such as icons and text) it's the way it should be imo. Still I don't mind "white" as the background color -- I just push down the overall brightness of the screens making it more matte.
How much battery life does it really save? Compared to say removing all the preinstalled bullshit apps that are running in the background such as facebook- and google apps? Same? More? Less?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:16PM
This is because of the marketing department.
The devices look more eye catching on store shelves under the harsh mercury vapor lamps of many big-box stores when their default brightness is 11. A user, having retina burn as a result, is not their concern.
Granted, marketing is behind the times as usual, because the number of buyers going to those big-box stores to make their purchase is steadily decreasing. And default brightness at 11 makes no difference in the Amazon web page for the device as the user is deciding to buy, or not to buy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by zoward on Saturday October 26 2019, @02:37PM (1 child)
The author repeatedly uses words like "ugly", without actually considering the possibility that other people might find the current omnipresent narrow gray text on blank white color scheme to be far uglier. Personally, I almost always go for an off-white color on a black background when that's available as I find that more comfortable ... but, as always, YMMV.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday October 27 2019, @04:37AM
I've found the most restful background is a dark grey, shaded toward blue, and as you say off-white fonts. This reduces the OMG CONTRAST issue that can make white-on-black difficult to read.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Saturday October 26 2019, @02:56PM (1 child)
There were two contra-experiential assertions
and a rebuttal to
that amounted to "I don't want them spending any time working on anything but what *I* care about!"
Oh and VT220 for life.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:31PM
And don't forget the implicit assertion that the skills required to re-theme a website are exactly the same needed to fix whatever the fuck is wrong with Apple's and M$'s desktop OSes, or to patch up Youtube's and Instagram's "algorithms". (In both cases failing to recognize that the root problems are much deeper than a developer can fix regardless of skillset.)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by loic on Saturday October 26 2019, @03:17PM (3 children)
People are so damn irrational these days that they would rather spend hours setting every single piece of software to a dark theme rather than set their frigging brightness to a reasonable setting. There is a damn button on every single monitor and TV under the sun. Just use it!
You cannot expected that with a varying ambient light that the monitor brightness is always set perfectly. I usually change my work dual-monitor brightness settings at least twice a day, to adjust to ambient lightning. I even scripted it so that it is only a script to run.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:25PM (1 child)
Contrast and readability drop with the brightness so with a black-on-white theme you choose between straining your eyes or losing screen real-estate as you try to drop the resolution or increase the font's height to compensate. On smartphones it's even worse for people using the likes of whatsapp where they'd have to keep going back and forth from high brightness when watching videos to lower brightness when texting.
compiling...
(Score: 1) by zion-fueled on Saturday October 26 2019, @10:38PM
This. My brightness is low already. I still get blasted with the white light, or rather blue light since its an LCD. It's sure fun when you're watching shows at night and trying to get sleepy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Sunday October 27 2019, @03:38AM
I agree that more people should learn how to use it, but...
During late night and early morning, it doesn't matter what the contrast / brightness is. It either hurts my eyes (literally) or is unreadable. I don't have that problem during the day. Dark mode really helps me. It's something beyond my conscious control.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bart9h on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:06PM (2 children)
How good it is to have a dark theme on my desktop environment and my browser, if the webpages are all white?
There is a nice browser extension (I use it in Firefox, but looks like it works on Chrome too) called Stylus, that let's you apply themes no any website.
You can write the CSS theme by hand, but the good part is that there is an extensive database of user-contributed themes that you can easily pick from, covering all major sites, and even most of the not so famous ones (like cppreference.com, open.gl, nature.com, duckduckgo.com, etc)
(Score: 3, Informative) by dx3bydt3 on Saturday October 26 2019, @08:30PM (1 child)
Also Soylentnews!
I made one of the first, if not the first dark styles for this site: https://userstyles.org/styles/98714/soylent-news-dark [userstyles.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @08:50PM
Awesome, thank you so much for finally allowing me to enjoy a dark theme without creating an account.
Looks like form elements are still white, so I might have to add some tweaks to your style.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by hwertz on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:13PM
Do I use dark mode on my applications? Nope. That's an Apple thing, and I don't do Apple. I run a nice Linux distro, and (since dark mode is a fad) therefore have ZERO applications that even have a dark mode option. As a fad, if I wanted a dark mode I'd install a dark desktop theme. But I don't.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by noneof_theabove on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:44PM (1 child)
my 1998 $4000us Toshiba laptop
Orange mode only screen
I think they had a green on black model also.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday October 26 2019, @07:09PM
What laptop was that? By 1998 laptops had pretty much taken the basic form they still use today.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by legont on Saturday October 26 2019, @05:23PM
I set whatever I could to the darkest mode possible since I started using computers in late 70s. I do have bad eyes and I feel the pain. On a separate note I reported my employer to get the light in the office dimmer and it worked.
Artificial light is bad in any form and the less we have the better.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday October 26 2019, @06:09PM
Here's why the Dark Mode craze is just crazy.
Where? Nothing in the summary. Smells like click bait
I like dark mode because a bright white page washes out the text, got a bit of cataract...
It's definitely easier on the eyes.
But they still do it wrong. Some lighter gray on the window title bar wouldn't hurt.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Saturday October 26 2019, @07:38PM
Generally dark mode is easier on my eyes and I've been using it long before it was cool.
The white light burns my retinas after a while. What I really want is apps that respond to my desktop theme properly, in this case, XFCE.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @08:03PM
There is no one size fits all for this one. I suffer from migraines and have been inverting screen colors since the late 90s, which helps prevent them (for me). But there are times when I choose not to due to environmental lighting conditions. At night I prefer inverted but sitting outside the local coffee shop I find the normal black-on-white to be better. I used to run Compiz which had a very nice invert feature that operated on individual windows; I really miss it. Today I make do with browser plugins and the brightness control on my laptop. Per-window color inversion really should be a properly thought out operating system feature. On Mac/Windows you can switch to high contrast mode but they are both quite awful, even from an accessibility perspective.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by BK on Saturday October 26 2019, @08:10PM (2 children)
It turns out that light mode – dark text on a white background - also looks terrible. Especially this new thing with gray text on a white background. It’s like tearing ones eyeballs out. Or reading serious work in comic sans.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Sunday October 27 2019, @03:40AM (1 child)
No, it's worse. A lot of websites today use gray on gray. I've used a color picker to check. I can't understand the logic of it either. It strains the eyes until it's unreadable.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday October 27 2019, @04:47AM
Oh, my personal favorite for awful... a survey site that uses pale teal atop pale grey. (To be fair it may be pale teal on white on the dev's screen, but that's not really any better.) The teal sorta glows against the grey and makes this aliased-looking blur.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday October 27 2019, @05:26AM
It reduces my need for schizophrenia meds. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Touché) by Walzmyn on Sunday October 27 2019, @10:09AM
I'm reading this site in dark mode and have been since day 1 and this dude can kiss it.
Looking at an all white website or app or whatever is like staring into a flashlight. I wish black backgrounds had been default since we added GUIs to computers. So much easier on my eyes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 27 2019, @06:00PM
too lazy to look it up. soemtimes tech doesn't work as expected. one would assume that turning stuff inverse (dark everything, except what you want to display) would save the monitor from using electrcity; alas as someone enlightend me, on LCD it's a "mask" with the source blasting away nomater wat.
however, if what-you-set-is-what-you-get would work on the hardware level, then we could also introduce "half" or even "quarter fonts".
since we (hopefully) don't have to decypher individual letters anymore but rather read by "skimming" we could have a font, where each letter is composed of 4 "quarter glyphes" that alternate (on linux we can set the rotation or flicker speed). this way the monitor only requires a quarter of energy to display the same information.
the downside would be "flicker" and "living" glyphes.
we could also install a eye tracking camera that "erases" letter where we don't look.
every watt saved makes the forest fire less tragic and the off-grid battery last longer ^_^