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IOS Technology

The Dark Side of Dark Mode (tidbits.com) 131

Apple, which has already introduced "dark mode" in macOS, is widely expected to replicate this in its mobile operating system iOS this year. The move comes as a number of technology companies introduce dark mode in their apps and operating systems. But is it something everyone wants?

TidBITS: When text is white on a black background as it would be in Dark Mode, the whiteness of the lines lightens the edges of each line broadly on both sides, blurring the edge. If the thin lines of the text are black and the background is white, however, white from both sides washes over the entire line, lightening it evenly, so the edges aren't blurred. Blur is a bad thing because of how the human eye relies primarily on contrast when extracting detail from an image. In "Reality and Digital Pictures" (12 December 2005), Charles wrote: The eye does not see light per se, it sees changes in light -- contrast. If two objects do not contrast with one another, to the eye they meld into one. This fact makes controlling the contrast of adjacent details to be paramount in importance. He was focused on issues revolving around photographs, but contrast has been shown to be paramount in numerous studies of textual legibility as well.

Of course, contrast goes in both directions -- black on white and white on black both have high contrast. In the scientific literature, black on white is called "positive polarity," whereas white on black is called "negative polarity." Numerous studies over decades of research have found that positive polarity displays provide improved performance in a variety of areas. [...] Taptagaporn and Saito (1990, 1993) tracked changes in pupil size for different illumination levels as well as for the viewing of different visual targets, such as a cathode ray tube (CRT) display, script and keyboard. They found less visual fatigue as measured by the frequency of changes in pupil size when working was accomplished with a positive than with a negative polarity display. Likewise, Saito, Taptagaporn, and Salvendy (1993) found faster lens accommodation and thus faster focusing of the eye with positive than with negative polarity displays.

To summarize, a dark-on-light display like a Mac in Light Mode provides better performance in focusing of the eye, identifying letters, transcribing letters, text comprehension, reading speed, and proofreading performance, and it results in less visual fatigue and increased visual comfort. The benefits apply to both the young and the old, as that paper concludes: In an ageing society, age-related vision changes need to be considered when designing digital displays. Visual acuity testing and a proofreading task revealed a positive polarity advantage for younger and older adults. Dark characters on light background lead to better legibility and are strongly recommended independent of observer's age.

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The Dark Side of Dark Mode

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  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @03:15PM (#58687660)
    ,,, the trend towards light grey on white text colours and the lightweight fonts that seem to be all the style nowadays. Why make something that you want people to read, more difficult to read?
    • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @03:44PM (#58687820)
      The real problem is UI developers refusing to give users control over how things look on their own devices. Windows has color themes and customizable fonts. Why can't mobile devices?
      • There is usually an accessibility feature on any given mobile device or properly designed app to do this, assuming you don't need any given screen to be gussied up with fancy patterns and whatnot. Yes, "properly designed" makes for some wonderfully true Scotsmen.

        I exclusively read books and web serials in dark mode on oled screens. Specifically my V30 and an older model Lenovo Yoga I got off ebay. Not having a mass of white lighting screaming at my eyes is a must have. If oled displays weren't financially v

      • I'm mystified on how this is even a debate. Some people like dark mode. Some people hate it. Let the users use what works for them.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Some Android devices do. It's manufacturer dependent, but for example last time I checked Samsung devices let you choose the font. Lineage too, as well as supporting colour themes.

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by Hognoxious ( 631665 )

      Why put a comma between the subject, and the rest of the sentence?

      You, are an imbecile. The person who taught you English, is a cunt.

      It. 's annoying, isn't it?

    • Monkey see monkey do.
      Most new design is monkey do

    • by Megane ( 129182 )
      Nowadays? I was complaining about what I called "85/85" like 15 or so years ago! (85% body text font size/85% grey, often with a light grey background). Not that it hasn't gotten worse (Discord's two, count 'em two, color choices are both awful, light mode is just less bad), but it's not a new problem.
  • by enigma32 ( 128601 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @03:16PM (#58687670)

    I was ready to declare these tidbits folks idiots... until I skimmed the article.

    They're right for calling out Apple's marketing folks for claiming "dark mode" to have benefits it doesn't/won't.

    Enough with the BS already, Apple. Don't ruin a good thing.

    • Perhaps, but they're also talking about how light-on-dark has this wash-out effect and I'm looking right at it and it doesn't. There's no haloing on monitors that aren't from 1995.
    • I used dark mode for a while but one activity just made it unusable so I went back to the light.

      When you cut and paste text from a website that is black on white into an e-mail the text comes out white or unreadable!.

      I kept expecting them to fix this oversight but they didn't so I gave up.

      Otherwise I immensely prefer it

      • Paste as unformatted text. It will drop the website font preferences and use whatever the program you're pasting the text into is set to.

      • Send plaint text emails then and not html ones.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        I kept expecting them to fix this oversight but they didn't so I gave up.

        Congratulations on learning how to copy and paste with and without formatting today. You're going to get a hang of this computer thing in no time. *thumbs up*

    • by jon3k ( 691256 )
      I think the only benefit is your phone not blinding you when reading in the dark. This could probably mostly be remedied by lowering the brightness, but maybe not totally. As someone who's been using a black terminal with white text for about .. oh ... longer than I care to admit, I can understand people's preference for dark backgrounds.
    • and VT-100 text. on a $1000 or higher smartphone. where's the DB-25 connector?

    • by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @03:53PM (#58687862)

      My welcome is different from your welcome.

    • Hehehe,
      I bought that album on cassette a few weeks after release. I had not really heard much of it and bought it because it was playing at the record store while I browsed.
      Driving around back country roads smoking weed at two or three in the morning with a carload of friends.
      Time plays.....lulls you into complacency.....and then....ALARMS GO OFF!!
      I damned near drove us into a ditch.
      Became one of my favorite albums.
  • by xA40D ( 180522 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @03:24PM (#58687714) Homepage

    best thing that happened to me recently was when Microsoft Explorer turned dark; I've always found vast acres of white make for a really hard time getting things done; glare makes the words and letters almost dance; and on bad days my eyes would hurt from the bright; so Dark Modes are a godsend.

  • SCREW DARK MODE! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zorro ( 15797 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @03:25PM (#58687728)

    I am NOT a bat and I enjoy sunlight!

    Blues and greys work just fine.

  • by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @03:28PM (#58687746) Journal

    Dark characters on light background lead to better legibility and are strongly recommended independent of observer's age.

    You know ... like almost every piece of printed matter you've ever read in your life?

    • by skids ( 119237 )

      That was to save ink and because white ink is hard to do. Had nothing to do with eye comfort.

      Also for my it isn't "practically every peice of printed matter" I've read. I think I'm running about 50/50 only because most software/websites make it impossible to turn the background black and stay usable. I pine for the days of VT-100s. If I could I'd do everything in "negative" mode. Much easier on my eyes, despite what these guys say. Also psychologically I find it more "positive" because the text is lit

  • by crunchy_one ( 1047426 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @03:38PM (#58687796)
    I prefer green on black, just the way god intended it.
    • I prefer green on black, just the way god intended it.

      You misspelled "orange on black".

    • There was research way way back that showed that green-on-black and amber-on-black were easier on the eyes than white-on-black or black-on-white. I like green-on-black better because I'm partial to green, but I have to grudgingly admit that amber-on-black might be a little easier to read.

  • Seriously, what did I just read...!? Users want dark mode. Companies are adding dark mode. Dark mode is optional, and generally off by default. *BUT* we shouldn't do this, because dark mode is shit on a CRT monitor, which nobody has touched in a decade or more!? I'm absolutely dumbfounded here.

    And yes, I get that everyone is different, but honestly I can read SIGNIFICANTLY faster in dark mode. Been coding for over 20 years, and once I've made the switch, I cannot go back. Bright backgrounds are just too har

    • I use flux together with the dark mode -- My Visual Studio is in dark mode but most of the other surface area is not -- and tone down all the blue colors, so the white looks a bit sepia. Not very exciting but I'm guessing that's why it feels easier on the eyes.

    • by Megane ( 129182 )
      SOME users want dark mode. SOMETIMES (like this case) it is optional. It is usually not optional on a web site. I spent a lot of time making a complete set of CSS overrides so that I can read hackaday as full black on light grey, rather than its 100% green on black, and also for another web site I read regularly. At night, I just turn down the backlight on my laptop.
  • by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @03:48PM (#58687840)

    I actually like dark mode but one of the main reasons is it runs counter to "tiny thin gray text on bright white background" movement. That said, every single vendor coming out with dark mode is just a symptom of the cargo culting going on in software dev these days. DevOps gives you a lot of good automation tools, etc. but it also gives the feature treadmill...everything has to be a feature, you have to release every week/day/hour, so it becomes easier to just copy something else you saw your competitor do and call it a revolutionary new feature.

    I think when the Second Dotcom Bubble bursts, they'll study DevOps and find that wiring up programmers to dashboards 24/7 leads to burnout even if their work becomes easier. It's too easy for a lousy manager to look at a burndown chart or a list of someone's activity and pressure them into coding faster and rolling out more features. My opinion is that the only reason it's working well for startups is because there's a new hungry crop of CS students out there who haven't had crappy jobs that grind them down yet.

  • Yes there are some downsides to Dark Mode, but its focus is to interfere less with sleep, and it does that demonstrably.

    • by Megane ( 129182 )
      Or you could just turn down the backlight on your laptop, assuming you've got a screen with decent backlight control.
  • https://gizmodo.com/the-surpri... [gizmodo.com]
    and
    https://tatham.blog/2008/10/13... [tatham.blog]
    go into how people with astigmatism - a rather large % of the population - are less likely to love light text on dark backgrounds.

    There doesn't have to be one true color arrangement for everyone (though, as with many accessibility features, there's a tension between letting designers have complete control and letting users adjust things that make their lives easier

  • Dark Mode is not something I personally use or like, I really prefer dark text on light background.

    But I really understand the fervor for some people to have the text that way, for them I'm sure it really is more readable. So I fully support adding Dark Mode everywhere so that people can have a reading environment that works best for them.

    Any kind of generalized study will never be true of all people.

  • I wish mozilla/firefox would implement a darkmode in the browser so we dont have to use clunky slow extensions. Also every damn Microsoft application is blindingly white screens with black text. Kills eysight eventually. Eventually with OLED screens in everything black screen backgrounds will suck up much less power.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31, 2019 @04:02PM (#58687910)

    Numerous studies over decades of research have found that positive polarity displays provide improved performance in a variety of areas.

    This assumes nothing happened to monitor technology for decades, which clearly isn't the case. We can't assume a modern monitor to have the same effect as was measured before the monitor technology was in mass production.

    If we look at a CRT monitor, black means no light while white means full light. Today a monitor has a constant on light and then the pixels are filters to block light. This means black isn't completely off. Next we take light level stability into account. CRTs gives a powerful light, which fades until refreshed. Backlight is always on, avoiding the flickering. There is also better control of the light level as a user setting. Monitor brightness is also generally higher. In fact there are monitors today where minimum brightness is higher than the max brightness of some CRTs from decades ago.

    Yes I know there are multiple monitor types and backlight can be controlled by both voltage and PWM. If anything it just makes my argument stronger because it means more diversity to take into account when trying to make a general statement.

    All this combined means.... well good question. What we do know is that we can't assume the same result on modern monitors to be the same as the test results from "decades ago". 1990 and 1993 are mentioned and I can tell you for certain that monitors from back them were horrible for the eyes compared to what we have now.

    My personal experience is the total opposite of what the article claims. The high light level of white screens strain my eyes while dark mode makes my eyes relax. More relaxed eyes makes it easier to look at text for hours and dark mode has increased my coding productivity. However I have to admit that my eyes are more sensitive to light than the average eyes. While that makes it difficult for me to make a general statement, it does add another variable, which is an issue for the article: all human eyes aren't the same. What's best for some might not be best for all. It's not like everybody needs the same type of glasses either.

    Does this mean light or dark mode is best? I can't answer in general. All I can do is to present one case where dark mode is best (me+my setup+my workroom light level+whatever else applies), meaning it's a proof that "light mode is always best" is wrong. It doesn't matter if I'm unique because just one example is enough to disproof "always". I will not even take a guess at how often light or dark is best.

    Also what happened to research pointing towards our eyes straining because of too much light from modern screens? And too much blue light in screens.

    • The problem is not the monitors. The problems is our eyes.

      At night, light tends to bleed around the source a little bit making them blurry. The effect is even worse for people with astigmatism (28% of the population). https://kutv.com/resources/med... [kutv.com]

      White on black has the same effect, light bleeds around the text slightly making font a bit blurry regardless of the quality of the monitor. This was as true 20 years ago as it is today.

      Black text on white causes more light to enter your eye, which cause

  • >"But is it something everyone wants?"

    No. Of course no. And absolutely no. There is your obvious answer to that question.

    What users want on most systems is the ability to CONTROL and CUSTOMIZE the look/sizes/fonts/colors. So adding a dark mode? Great, no prob- add whatever you like, as long as users are not FORCED to use it.

  • Look, there's no doubt that there are arguments to be made against using dark mode, and the article lays a number of them out in a fair manner, but arguing against adding it as a preference that users can choose to use or not—as was done when the summary asked the leading question of "is it something everyone wants?"—is profoundly absurd.

    As a father with a one-month old infant, I would love it if my eyes could transition more easily from using an iPad in the dark to seeing my way in the dark to

  • Inverting colors will only fuck shit up if you're doing stupid shit like sub-pixel rendering and not accounting for that when inverting colors, or using a backlight and a shitty panel that lets a lot of bloom through.

    Turn off sub pixel rendering (fuck the color fringing it introduces - I hate hate hate hate hate it) or at least make it operate in greyscale only. The resolution of your devices should be high enough to render text without shitty hacks. But with iPhones? Even the $1100 XS Max will give you s

  • Decades of research, then another decade in the 90s of everyone rediscovering for themselves how bad light fonts are on dark backgrounds when everyone made their own website. It was a shitshow, and generally plain old dark text on light backgrounds became the norm again. So called dark mode is just another fashion trend that's been available forever in custom themes, and it's just making a temporary comeback. Likely so marketing can come up with 'light mode' in a few years and say they're doing something cu

  • I've been using dark mode for a few months, both in MacOS and Firefox (via the Midnight Lizard add-on). Unfortunately Thunderbird doesn't seem to offer dark mode and the glare of that white email window is a terrible eyesore.

    My 27 inch monitor is partly to blame. At its lowest brightness it is too dark to read. The next click up is too bright for my old eyes. So, yes, my eyes take some blame. I like to work in a fairly dark room and that too is a factor.

    Some web pages can be a challenge in a darkened Firefo

  • The modern cool thing to do is to make text gray-on-white or gray-on-black. The designers then make the titles and borders real black so they look super sharp. In exchange, regular text is harder to read. Classic form over function. Lots of web sites are doing this these days, even the product I am working on.

    We got customer feedback that the text is too small and too hard to read. I look at the CSS, and the text is actually like #555555 on #FFFFFF. The problem isn't that the font is too small, it's t

    • by Megane ( 129182 )
      Maybe not in your case, but back in the "Web 2.0" era of the mid-2Ks, CSS to set the body text size to 85% was some kind of fad with all the web "designers". Hey assholes, I set my font size this way in my browser preferences because that's the size at which I want to read text! In this decade we now have other sites (I think medium.com is an example) which set the body text size to 125% or more, usually sites with sensationalist click-baity content, as though it makes things more true or something like tha
  • IIRC, "Dark mode" was first introduced on the Mac for FCPX. Worked brilliantly - less extraneous light while editing video was very handy. When it was introduced in MacOS 10.14 I tried it for 5 minutes and turned it off. Too hard to use.

  • by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Friday May 31, 2019 @05:41PM (#58688302) Homepage Journal

    The funny thing about "dark mode" is that it's what (nearly) everyone already had, before we got web browsers training us to accept glaringly-bright reverse-video, thanks to Mosaic's annoying default style. "Dark mode" was the norm until the mid 1990s, and it was the web that dragged me into stoic acceptance of the new-fangled ubiquitous reverse-video. And hell yes we liked it! Now we will finally put things back to how they were always supposed to be! ;-)

    That is, assuming you ever left. The web itself was hopeless, but I can't be the only person who still composes in a text editor (which is, of course, white text on black background) and then pastes into the browser's textarea.

    You say ESC [?5h, but I say ESC [?5l.

  • Is this a preparation for the arrival of LED displays that draw much less power when most pixels on the screen are dark? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • ...think it a Good Idea to stare into a light bulb? Idiots.

    • On programs that don't do Dark Mode well, I wear some blue-blocking glasses. Between that and dark mode, my eyes feel a world better. Several of the people I work with are having eyesight problems. Well, yeah. Staring into a light bulb all day. Duh. They even see me using dark mode, but they sit there with the screen just burning holes into their eyeballs.

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