Microsoft Backtracks On Dark Mode; Windows 11 Will Ship In Light Mode By Default (betanews.com) 83
New submitter SofiaWW writes: A few days ago, at Microsoft Inspire, it was announced that Windows 11 would ship with dark mode activated by default. This was not a case of rumor or speculation, this was an announcement made at an official Microsoft event by a Microsoft employee. But now it transpires that the statement was not correct. Microsoft has now clarified that it "will ship Windows 11 SKUs in light mode on by default." No explanation for the miscommunications has yet been given.
In a related story: (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody gives a fuck.
Re:In a related story: Beaten by an AC! (Score:2)
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First post. (Score:3, Funny)
What benefit does dark mode by default bring to the user?
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It's the best Windows mode yet! (TM)
Re:First post. (Score:5, Informative)
Less eye strain, less power.
Apple tried pretending screens were paper with Macintosh but everything before that got light-on-dark correct.
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Re:First post. (Score:5, Insightful)
Xerox was the first with a black-on-white GUI with the Alto.
All of the companies making graphic-based machines --- Symbolics, TI, Microsoft, Apple, Next, etc., --- followed suit.
But all of this Dark Mode fluff is just marketing when we've had fully customizable color themes for, how long? ... at least two decades now.
As for saving energy, with current LCDs, they don't make much of an appreciable difference since the backlights are on at full brightness, all the time (except the newer HDR displays), and that's where the primary power sink is.
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On the latter point, while OLEDs are still far away from mainstream desktop, dynamic contrast has been a thing for a long time and zone dimming is fast on the way to becoming mainstream.
Both dim CCFL backlight(s) on modern LCD displays.
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(Should say CCFL and LED backlights)
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Not quite all. Amiga OS didn't go with black on white. Well, the dust version was orange on blue but by 2.04 they had switched to grey backgrounds.
Black or white on grey was actually pretty good.
Actually maybe orange on blue wasn't so bad. I used to use IBM DisplayWrite for DOS a lot and that was blue background with light grey text. Seemed okay, only issue was that after a while when you looked away everything was pink for a while.
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> But all of this Dark Mode fluff is just marketing when we've had fully customizable color themes for, how long? ... at least two decades now.
No, this is wrong. First, only older Windows and some of the pieces of Linux support such full customization- GNOME and similar usually give some kind of grief. More recent types of Windows don't offer anywhere close to the power you had in Windows 3.1, and only recently in Windows 10 do you have really solid support for what you would call a dark mode out of th
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GNOME and similar usually give some kind of grief.
Crack kills. Just say "No."
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As people have gotten use to computers, having them try to pretend to be every day objects is less and less useful.
The Desktop Paper that Macintosh used made sense in the 1980's but nearly 40 years later. We don't need that abstraction, as we are less likely to deal with paper anyways.
Re:First post. (Score:5, Insightful)
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There was a difference between the layout and the writing though. I bet many writers didn't use a white background.
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Re: First post. (Score:2)
I think you need a citation that explains why a citation is necessary in this case. I recommend you look up presumption in argumentation to give you a primer as to why not only is it undesirable to cite every claim, but it is impossible to do so. Important to this situation, the poster was making a claim that was clearly speculative and intended for you to consider as a possibility that we can likely infer to be true. He seemed well aware of the impossibility of quantifying that claim. Rather, because it al
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Sure, and desktop publishing remains a perfectly reasonable thing to have as black on white. It's just odd how much customization we have lost over time. The same geniuses that briefly changed the windows icons to a bunch of twocolor shitpiles also pushed dark-gray-on-light-gray as a standard for a bit too.
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It's less power only for OLED monitors and (mostly HDR) monitors with local dimming. For "normal" (TN/IPS/PVA) monitors the difference is minuscule.
What really matters is your monitor brightness and most people never change it. Every day at night I see lots of people who use their smartphones at maximum brightness.
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OLEDs save power with dark mode. LCDs, on the other hand, use the same amount of power regardless of what is showing on the screen unless you adjust the backlight - but that's a hardware, not a software setting. Both eyestrain and power usage can be reduced by simply lowering the default display brightness of most screens from "I'm looking into the sun" 50 to 60 brightness to something more reasonable like 25 to 30 brightness. Colors are a little more washed out but you won't go blind nor have as many he
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Nitpick: LCDs use more power to display black than white since they charge the polariser on a pixel to block off the backlight. But this is minor compared to the power of a backlight.
More importantly though some LCDs will dynamically "enhance" contrast by boosting the backlight when displaying white and dimming it when displaying black. These consume more power to show white. Other displays actually enhance contrast and don't just bullshit by varing the lighting condition across the backlight (e.g. HDR scre
Re:First post. (Score:5, Insightful)
Less eye strain, less power.
Ironically both of those are wrong in the most general case. There's more too it than that:
Firstly: Eyestrain is related to a large deviation from the natural environment. In any well lit room that meet the requirements of any modern OSHA approved office building, dark text on a 150cd/m^2 screen provides the *least* eyestrain. The screen should not deviate from the environment, only the text should. Now in my dark dimly lit study where I just measured the lighting to be somewhere in the order of 50cd/m2 instead of the minimum 150-200cd/m2 recommended for an office, you are absolutely right. Us basement dwellers and nightcrawlers have less eyestrain in dark mode.
Secondly: LCD panels in their default unpowered position do no generate a polarized condition. This applies to the overwhelming majority of dumb backlit panels on the market, like the cheap shit you'll get in any typical office. These LCDs use more power to display black than they do to display white.
Where that doesn't apply is on displays which have high contrast backlighting, which actively light up the white areas darker than the black areas since the backlight consumes more power than the LCD itself. They make white areas whiter and dark areas blacker by modulating light. They consume less power in night mode. As does any emissive technology (e.g. OLED).
As always: It's complicated.
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At least dark mode does reduce power consumption for some users, if a probable minority. Defaulting to it would probably have been a big mistake though, unless it somehow also has more contrast than light mode. Whatever your default display mode, it has to be high-contrast — both for accessibility, and for the general case where the screen might be dirty, poorly oriented, of poor quality, or any combination of the above.
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At least dark mode does reduce power consumption for some users, if a probable minority.
And would increase it for others. E.g. anyone with an "office" style monitor which implements dynamic contrast control in the proper way: rasing the backlight for dark screens and dimming it for bright ones to reduce eyestrain.
Now gamers with their HDR screens and individually backlit zones, well if your screen has that kind of LED backlight or is self emissive like OLED then it probably already uses a fraction of the power of many LCDs.
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Most office monitors I've had don't do dynamic brightness at all. And I color calibrate my monitor and expect it to display faithfully, so I have dynamic brightness turned off.
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Less eye strain, less power.
Less power, probably, but all the research has shown that it is more eye strain, not less. For fairly obvious reasons.
Basically, Dark Mode is a fashion fad, nothing more.
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Less eye strain, ...
Some evidence [techradar.com] to the contrary [allaboutvision.com]
Just from personal experience. One of my favorite web sites, DeviantArt.com, overhauled their entire web site with a "dark mode". When it went live the contrasts between the black back ground and white text/graphics gave me a splitting eyestrain headache in under 5 minutes. And I wasn't the only one who had problems with it, pretty much any one with preexisting vision issues like astigmatism and related found the sites new look to be literally a pain to use. Even after the
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I tend to like Dark mode, as I want to see information, but not necessarily light my whole room/office. Being that monitors (unlike paper) project light vs reflect it, makes it much easier to read content. As I am reading the light being projected into my eyes.
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None really. It's just considered a new and amazing feature by younger users who have never seen customization of a desktop before.
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The word is "fresh."
Just in case it's not clear, I agree with you.
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Well there's no need for Windows when it's dark...
Re: dark mode benefit (Score:2)
For one thing? It's a technique to fix problems in Windows 10 Mail app where it won't display message bodies when you click on the message subject/headers in your Inbox. Toggle Win 10 to dark mode and relaunch Mail and they're visible again! (Well, at least temporarily. Mail is a really buggy app.)
In other news (Score:1)
Satya Nadella will begin inserting pennies in his loafers.
Wait a minute, now he says he won't. Never mind. Carry on.
I Guess the Jedi won this time (Score:4, Funny)
But the Sith will get their revenge
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The Sith are the isht.
A difficult technology (Score:4, Informative)
Google, Apple, and Microsoft are racing to provide the latest in user experience technology: Dark Mode.
The history of Dark Mode goes back to 1993 when FVWM and RXVT offered users the ability to control the back ground color of their desktop. A few years later, in 1997, Winamp arrived and while it had Dark Mode working perfectly it took several versions before a Light Mode was available to general users.
Really this crap is like Skins [wikipedia.org] and Themes [wikipedia.org]. Even the old style guides for Motif and OPEN LOOK indicated how to select complementary colors for UI elements, enabling a consistent display of text labels on dark and light backgrounds.
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Reminds me of the old days back in the early 90s when I found a Motif theme called "Way Ugly". It was purple and brown and green.
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Could it be word that Windows 3.1's Hot Dog Stand theme?
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As far as I'm concerned, Canonical provides the best user experience, take your pick, straight Ubuntu or KUbuntu.. Fuck Microsoft.. Prove me wrong..
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Apple Google and MS are racing to provide the latest in experience: The ability to select between light and dark mode. Whether a screen is causing you eyestrain or not depends on the environment. Basement dwellers will likely prefer dark mode. Office workers light mode.
Technology companies flip flopped on this because the research about it hadn't clearly linked how what is good for your eyes is related to the environment. They did that in the late 00s and dark mode *options* started showing up last decade
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Indeed. Still running that FVWM config I did in 1993 myself. Ported to FVWM2 and larger resolution, but that was all that was needed in changes in all this time.
MS is now officially 30 years late to the party. Well, that and the pager FVWM came with in 1993 is still better than anything available on Win10 and, I expect, Win11.
Please note (Score:3)
The meeting of the people who care will be held in the phone booth behind the MS headquarters.
Geezers'r'us (Score:3)
It's great to have dark mode coming back. I just don't understand why it took more than 30 years.
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The worst is when idiots create UIs with grey print on white or off white. Can't see that at all, practically.
That brings back memories of when I would deal with redlines of BOMs. One time someone sent in a redline where the crossed out text was a really pale gray. I had to tell them that while I'm not a stickler for the redlines actually being red, there needs to be a certain minimum level of contrast.
A lot of the rest of your comment reminds me of why I could never use the Enlightenment window manager back in the days before GNOME and KDE. Dark backgrounds with dark text, which was insanely tiny to boot. So unles
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I beg to differ with you: The worst is when idiots create UIs with grey print on black. The keypad on many microwaves is like that, which makes them impossible to read.
Of course we could both be right: dark gray on black and light gray on white could be equally bad. And using a thin line font, which seems to be a current fad, makes it even worse.
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For me, black backgrounds just give me a kind of headache. It's almost like I'm looking at those "3d" images where you sort of cross your eyes to "decode" the image. Some colors and fonts seem to be concave others convex and it just gets really disorienting. Not saying my experiences represent anyone other than me, but it's why I prefer "light" modes.
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basically no tech type understood why it was suddenly black text on a glaring white background. The only vague explanation was that it looked more like ink on paper, but...why would that be a good thing?
Actually there were very good reasons for the change: Reduced glare and reduced eyestrain. Wait that's the opposite of what you just said right? Right, and for good reason: environments. Over the past 40 years human interaction studies and health studies have produced contradicting evidence of what is good: Looking like paper, or looking like ... well dark mode. It was only in the late 00s that studies finally addressed the issue: If you measure in an office building with OSHA approved lighting conditions w
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Making statements like "light mode produces significant eyestrain", even when specifying dark environments like "basement" but without considering the individual's own eyesight -- is not only bad information but reckless. This is only my own experience, therefore it's anecdotal, but I have tried hundreds of times to adapt to dark mode and it always hurts my eyes. Even in perfect darkness, I cannot focus clearly on white text on dark screen. I know my eyes suck, I'm myopic and astigmatic, and I'm never going
Re: Geezers'r'us (Score:2)
"Hence the past decade has moved almost universally towards something completely new: Not dictating to the users which to use, but giving them the option to use either."
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Making statements like "light mode produces significant eyestrain", even when specifying dark environments like "basement" but without considering the individual's own eyesight -- is not only bad information but reckless.
No its not. High contrast creates additional eyestrain. That's really the end of it. Your eyesight may make that worse or better, but it doesn't magically mean that relationship becomes reversed.
Eye strain and your ability to focus are two very different things. And FWIW I agree with you. I have astigmatism and I also find it hard to focus on light objects in the dark than I do dark objects in the light.
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You're right, and I now accept the difference between eyestrain and focusability. Thanks.
Change is bad! (Score:1)
News at 11.
Re:Change is good! (Score:2)
News at 11:01.
I wonder what the split is on this (Score:2)
I know that people who like Dark Mode, like it a LOT....
But I myself have always hated Dark Mode, I just find it very hard to use for any length of time. Even back when I was using terminals (where Dark Mode was the norm) I was happy when I could invert the terminal.
I always wondered - what do most people really prefer? Maybe this reversion by Microsoft back to the mean gives us an answer.
I am glad that so many platforms and tools support dark mode really well so people can work the way they prefer, as I
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I always wondered - what do most people really prefer?
It looks nice, but for me the problem is reading text - white/light text on dark background leaves me with 'ghost lines' when I look away after reading text - kind of like the effect of staring at window blinds with some sunshine shining through, then closing your eyes (obviously not as intense, but still annoying - I'm sure there's a term for this, I just don't know it).
Also have issues with text (Score:1)
then closing your eyes (obviously not as intense, but still annoying - I'm sure there's a term for this, I just don't know it).
I'm not sure I get that effect, but maybe I do as it's light text on a dark background I especially dislike about dark mode and maybe I'm just not noticed that effect is what is making me dislike it.
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With black on white text, the difference in light output between a page full of text and a blank page is 5-10%. With white on black text, that difference is 100%. That means increased eye strain, especially as you get older and your eyes become slower to adapt. And possibly ghosting effects.
On a tiny phone screen dark mode is fine, because the ambient light around the phone makes up most of the light that meets your eye, and your pupils don't need to change a lot. On a large desktop monitor on the other h
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That's my theory. It's testable: If I'm right, then the older you get, the less likely you are to prefer dark mode.
Very interesting point, I can't really add any data to that since I always disliked dark mode even when young. But it seems like a good theory and I'll keep an eye open next time I am at a conference as to what age ranges are using dark mode on laptops...
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People prefer what they're used to seeing, simply because they're used to seeing it. No deeper thought - or any thought - occurs. My own preference is not staring into a lamp. I like the lighting in the room to be above me, not in my face. Negative space on your screen should not be illuminated. Especially not to the point that it's maxing out every color channel, squeezing every last lumen out of your monitor, for the entire time it's turned on.
I'm guessing MS had just wrapped up a focus group of non-nerds
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Yeah, your argument is so much improved by using the word "boomer" to describe someone. Asswipe.
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It wasn't inaccurate. Anyway, if it upsets you, you're probably one of those giving their entire generation a bad name. It's not about an age, it's about an attitude. You can change. I believe in you.
I don't think so... (Score:1)
People prefer what they're used to seeing, simply because they're used to seeing it. No deeper thought - or any thought - occurs.
I don't see how that is true though as I used terminals with light text on a dark background for a quite a while and instantly found the reverse much nicer.
Also there are a lot of people forced to use black on white text for many years who switch to and love Dark Mode as soon as they can enable it...
How would people these days be used to Dark Mode since it's not on by default in a
Why is this so hard! (Score:2)
I am trying to wrap my head around why Dark Mode is so hard for developers to implement.
In HTML is is just using a different stylesheet, in most programs you may have to search and replace any hard coded colors and replace them with a variable (A global variable while may not be what the professor gives you an A on, will work to fix the problem quickly.)
Sure I get perhaps not all objects may work as planned, but if you can get most of the objects to work, it is better than nothing at all.
It took Facebook ye
Early Windows 10 was very dark. (Score:3)
Makes total sense (Score:3)
Light mode is usable in any lighting conditions.
Dark mode is pretty bad for daytime use, especially when your room is lit by sunlight.
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As everyone ages, their eyes change--nuclear sclerosis, vitro macular adhesion, and floaters. These are basically the inside layers over your retina, macula, rods and cones start separating. Sometimes this separation pulls away at the retina causing tears (meaning rips) in the retina. That's a detached retina. Anyway, the person this happens to ends up with pieces of this debris from the back on the eye blocking their vision. Some debris like floaters moves around a bit and so it gets in the way someti
Why can't you just have custom colors (Score:4, Insightful)
You could create "dark mode" all the way back from Windows 2.0, and choose dark mode, light mode, or even pink or green mode, if you preferred. Just set the colors to whatever the heck you wanted.
This was possible up to Windows 7 (if you disabled "Aero"). After Win8/10, it's no longer possible. You have the few themes you can select from and that's that.
How is it that we have gone from setting whatever colors you wanted to any UI element you wanted to ... *2* options?
Well, I only use Windows for gaming so I don't care what theme it uses for that, games run in full screen anyway...
Dark mode, my butt (Score:3)
They can't - and won't - make it, ever.
Simply because any *standard* win32 api window that appears, appears _white_ by default.
Go ahead, disable animations and open a file explorer window, a command prompt, pretty much any win32 program - you will be greeted with a white flash before the window has a chance to paint itself.
Worst offender is firefox on my system.
what explanation ? (Score:2)
No explanation for the miscommunications has yet been given.
There probably wasn't a 'miscommunication' at all. The original plan was to go dark mode by default but after the announcement Microsoft got a lot of negative feedback about how bad dark mode can be for office workers and and older computer users MS backtracked and it was suddenly "Oh, we aren't really doing that! Honest!" rather than just admit that going dark mode by default is a bad idea for a desktop OS.