I used to code with black themes for a long time but not anymore: Why not simply lower your screen brightness ?
I feel it better for my eyes because the text which i'm looking at is actually dark and not bright.
Most people with dark themes have high brightness levels on their screens. I think this can be bad on the long term. Especially that many screen elements are not as dark as their code, which makes them ultra bright
On at least two cheap laptops I have used recently, the display driver steps down the overall display brightness when large regions of the screen are dark.
Windows 10 on an HP Stream 11, Intel integrated graphics and Intel display driver.
I can turn down the manual brightness to its minimal setting.
When large windows with white backgrounds are on screen, the backlight brightness increases. Decreases again when the windows are off screen or closed.
This does not change the manual brightness setting.
Do people also get annoyed at printed paper being white? Do they wish books had black pages? If not, as you say, it is only a matter of adjusting the screen for the proper brightness, depending on ambient light.
And it is true that, inevitably, whatever you're doing, sooner or later some white background or picture will appear on screen and blast your eyes with light. I cannot stand this, so I don't use dark themes on my PC.
A white screen with high brightness can't be compared to white paper. If you have a bright lamp behind the white paper, you can begin to compare the problem. A white screen is fine for young people without any eye problems, when you get older and start having problems with the eyes, you might need to cut down on blue light to prolong the usage of your eyes depending on what problems you get. I have to use filters to remove blue light to not make my eyes worse.
That’s why I love redshift, I shove everything way over into the red and turn the gamma right down, I also killed the overhead lights in my office so it’s a comfortable quiet cave to work in.
> Do people also get annoyed at printed paper being white?
Printed paper glowing white would indeed be very annoying.
Passive displays, such as old non-backlit LCD or e-ink, can be white and not annoying. Most people don't want to stare into a light source more than necessary.
Using proper brightness helps, and dark mode can help even more.
What's the difference between a screen emitting X light as a primary light source and a sheet of paper emitting the same exact amount of light, as a secondary light source ?
The amount of light coming to your retina stays the same..
Just lower the brightness until it matches the amount of light reflected by a sheet of paper placed next to the screen.
If you can't read the paper, turn the lights on. Being in a dark room dilates your pupils which makes them even more sensible to bright light...
I've also read that it takes more power (battery) to render black than it does white. Combined with the need for more brightness it doesn't seem like a good solution.
Calibrating my monitors took them from having piercing bluish whites to more softer pinkish whites and reduced daytime eye strain significantly.
I then use Redshift at night with the undocumented "preserve" switch to combine my icc profile with the Redshift changes.
I mean that when I build out an application / site, I build the Dark Mode first then convert the dark mode into the light mode. (Most of my users choose to use dark mode over light mode if the option is given to them)
Stylus is great when Darkreader breaks on certain sites. But when it works there are no substitutes e.g. navigating HN using the light setting in Darkreader offers a degree of customisation to create a scheme and reduce eye fatigue, without too much effort. Whereas, it can be hit and miss when trying various themes/stylesheets etc.
This has amusing effects on avatar images / pictures of faces. I wasn't quite mentally prepared for what I looked like with non-inverted colors but light shadows and dark highlights.
Dark mode, for the first time ever, has legitimate, objective reasons to want, now that we have pure LED displays: a black LED pixel consumes no energy.
CRTs consume so much power that the beam current is negligible. The comparison is with backlit LCD screens, which have to have the backlight on regardless of how many black pixels you have.
Actually traditional tft displays need to apply a current to turn a pixel black, so if you don't use adaptive brightness that would dim the backlight if the display is mostly black, you actually consume more power with a black theme. I have a low power Pentium notebook with 15" led backlit screen and the difference between a terminal with black or white background is significant.
Battery at 74%. Sitting at black screen for about a minute, the highest estimate I got was 4:50, lowest 4:05. It was mostly showing numbers close to either of these, almost never something in between.
Switching to white I got 5:40 and 4:50 showing pretty much the same behavior.
It's an HP pavilion 15-p005ng with a Pentium N3530. Terrible machine btw. Linux freezes in irregular intervals, almost immediately with OpenGL stuff...
I'm pretty sure that's how it works. The drivers report total battery capacity, current battery capacity, and current power draw, so the meters just do the math.
I remember my high school electrical engineering teacher challenging me to make a project out of comparing ways to save power with CRTs and LCDs. All black vs. all white screen had no measurable difference on my multimeter. I couldn't answer it at the time. I was convinced that it should save power.
I regularly get migraines, where "bright" lights are searingly painful to look at. When the symptoms aren't too bad, dark themes on a text editor are okay, but light themes are not.
Migraines aren't an uncommon problem.
I think that is a fairly objective reason driving the preference.
I dislike sites with dark background. Maybe it is a problem with my poor quality LCD screen, but I switch to reading mode on such sites (so that the background becomes white) because they are hard to read.
I'm pretty much the exact opposite. I typically use my computer/phone in a low light environment (monitor and phone are almost always on lowest brightness settings), and a white background hurts my eyes. I use a dark background wherever possible, especially when reading ebooks/longer articles on my phone.
Any good software designed for reading should have good support for both.
Don't most dark themes actually use dark grey rather than black? The material design dark theme guidelines [0] were posted recently and recommend dark grey as the primary surface colour.
Backlight control for dynamic range is common, but not necessary for being an “LED display.” It just means the backlight uses LEDs instead of CCFLs like they used to.
It's a display and it "has LED". Given a clean slate language reboot for today's technology we would probably reserve the term "LED display" to "LED per subpixel" models and call LED LCDs "LED backlit", but the term got into widespread use when the backlit kind was the only one available so that's where we are now.
Psst: Night Eye is a browser extension that has really, deeply impressed me by managing to give almost every website and web app a good-enough 'night mode,' surpassing all the quick-hack filter() solutions and more common extensions like Darken. https://nighteye.app/
It's frustrating to me that browsers lend themselves so willingly to being fingerprinted, and it's up to the user to stay aware of and keep ahead of these new avenues.
I wish there were 4 modes:
- Standard/light mode
- Dark mode (website has facilities to test for this and style accordingly)
- Dark mode with fake or unknown values advertised to the website
- Dark mode with a user-custom filter applied (like below) that the website cannot test for (it sees untransformed computed styles)
It's frustrating that we've come to a point where websites can track users by knowing how they set up their browser to render pages. Such information should have no way nor reason to ever be transmitted back from the client to the server in the first place.
One of the original, and continuing, uses of browser scripting is to tweak the layout based on client rendering quirks.
ISTR (late 1990's?) reading about fingerprinting attacks that didn't require script or even CSS. Subtle changes in font size and attributes (bold, italic) may affect the order in which page elements are requested by the browser.
Even if you wanted to, there's simply no reliable way to isolate data about client rendering from any other data exchanged with the server. Even if you did a heroic rearchitecture of the DOM and rendering system, there are still static IP addresses and cookies.
I put one together for TFB [1] a little while ago and used the prefers-color-scheme media feature in anticipation of it being supported more broadly. I'm super happy to see that added to Firefox.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
And it does the right thing and disables the feature when enabling the resist fingerprinting option.
I did a small survey and only very few websites have developed a second dark theme: https://zimbatm.com/DarkMode