The eyes are adapted to see daylight levels of light during daytime. If your ambient lighting and screen don't match this, then you're not using your body in the way it's evolved to function. What we need more of are screens with anti-glare and a wide range of brightness levels.
What might have a worse impact on your eyesight is the effects of Myopia, which is being exacerbated by basically every portable device with a screen. Anyone who has the technological literacy to enable dark mode (and advocate for it) is likely someone who gets above-average screen time and is therefore someone at a higher risk of myopia.
Hate the dark.
Dark is hard to see. Light is easy to see. I use light at every opportunity. Dark partially grew out of an interest in saving battery power on early oled screens, but dev's noticed a certain demographic drawn towards the dark look.
Depends on if you target a dark or bright ui. If you target a bright environment then you want to work in a bright environment and vice versa, otherwise you bias the work for the wrong environment as you say.
Well, I'll meet the dark-mode people halfway, and say that it should always be available to users who want it.
No one is saying that a personal preference for dark mode is invalid, just that it shouldn't be the default option, or worse, the only option.
There are easily 10x if not 100x as many sites that only support their default of light mode as those that even offer built-in support for dark mode, and it's more like 1000x as many as those that default to dark mode.
TFA does seem to be explicitly demanding erasure of the preferences of an insignificantly tiny minority of websites.
Light mode is lower contrast for me, and is more difficult to read text, especially at the end of the day.
Dark mode is a relief, and much easier to read for me.
I miss it in the situations when it is not available, like PDFs with small grey text on a white background, more so on a small screen like a phone.
Some people think dark vs light is opinion, but for some it is not.
more: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/
- dark mode may present some advantages for some low-vision users
- in users with normal vision, light mode leads to better performance most of the time.
- applications meant for long-form reading (such as book readers, magazines, and even news sites) should offer a dark-mode feature
Isn’t that already how it works in all major operating systems?
I think the debate comes down to how bright you keep your environment.
OP likes bright overhead lighting and confuses that preference for the superiority of a preference downstream of it. Yawn.
I’d rather look at a bright 27” screen in dark mode where I see full color fidelity than dim the screen so that bright backgrounds aren’t too harsh. But it’s just a preference.
it is a myth that dim lighting negatively impacts eyesight long term.
Until you are an adult - you must get outside light (even if it’s overcast winter). On average - luminosity (I hope that’s the term) outside is orders of magnitude above indoors, even when it’s overcast.
Kids without enough light have much bigger risk of shortsightedness. Because eyeball development is related to light.
There was even an article about this on HN couple weeks ago.
Make it configurable and let people be.
We should return to those great days of end user control. "Sensible defaults, but easy to override." Why can't I easily (without writing code) configure HN's background and text color, just through my browser's configuration UI?
Seriously, the fact that light vs dark is even an issue is silly. It only exists out of laziness and that's what we should really be mad about
Is there actually any evidence to support this claim? As far as I know, bright screen and dim room usually leads to eye fatigue and eye strain, but these are temporary issues. As far as I understood, any claims that computer work leads to long term vision problems are largely unfounded. Am I missing something here?
I recently had an encounter with a sight impaired person that had less than 10% left of his eyesight, and his exact words were "dark mode makes my experience easier".
Since meeting him, everything I do when it comes to UI, I try to be more mindful.
No, you should blame them. To this day optometrists will prescribe children glasses despite there being an ample body of evidence that working at distances closer than your far point with full-strength glasses will worsen myopia.
I’m not a huge fan of dark mode on the desktop personally, but the people who claim #000000 on #FFFFFFF is equivalent to a paper book are misguided.
For example, on my site [1], I default to dark mode (not pure black though) and have settings for changing the theme to: Pure black, Light mode (white), and 2 custom themes which are off white, and a dark blue background.
I picked dark mode as default because my site is directed towards tech people (it's for STEM + Arts and Design) and thought dark mode works well for that theme.
Any other questions, or are you short on time to waste yourself?
Edit due to rate-limiting: It should, but apparently doesn't, go without saying that using a terminal is very different from reading a web page.
* Default light and dark themes of programs/apps and sites that have illegible low-contrast color combinations. Very common, sometimes within themes they control entirely but apparently never tested both light and dark themes. (For example, the non-customizable foreground color a calendar program users to indicate task priority doesn't change when the theme changes the background color to dark. Or the terminal app thinks that yellow is a foreground color to use for highlighting warnings, and apparently the author has never heard of terminal windows with white backgrounds.)
* Bluesky's delayed page-loading full-screen interstitial of small butterfly logo against white backdrop, rendered when they know the session is in dark mode. If you've in dark mode in a dark room, winding down for bed at night, this is awful. I occasionally notice lesser problems like this with streaming video UIs, but not as consistently jarring/blinding as Bluesky. (Almost as awful as the movies/shows on home video streaming services that throw in gratuitous strobe light scenes. If it doesn't give the customers seizures, it stil can't be good for their sleep cycle. At least Bluesky's unnecessary sudden blinding white doesn't strobe.)
You don't like it? Don't use it.
Having dark mode as an option is an easy accessibility win. On the other hand, not having light mode as an option is just pure laziness in 2025.
Anyway, point is, the onus is on the author of this rant to adapt to his circumstances. Not to expect everyone to change everything for him.
There's a reason that extensions like Dark Mode¹ have 10,000,000+ installs while no "Light Mode" extensions can even exist as far as I can tell: more or less the entire internet is already light-mode by default, with no option even provided by webmasters for dark mode for those who want it on a vast majority of websites.
What I can't comprehend is why the people who already have light mode as the default across the entire internet can't be content letting people with a preference for dark mode even exist without aggressively trying to erase the preferences of people who don't feel the exact same way as themselves.
Further, for anyone using OLED panels, which is a non-insignificant portion, black backgrounds reduce power draw and therefore global carbon emissions. Light backgrounds literally accelerate climate change, however marginally.
[1] https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/a-brief-history-of-dark-mode-fr...
Dark mode fans: does it really bother you to read white web pages?
If a site is borked to the point that Dark Reader can't fix it, I'll use reader mode or just go somewhere else.
Your site looks just fine to me.
I'd say it's more of a courtesy thing. If you like a bit of a web design challenge, you can experiment with the prefers-color-scheme CSS feature. With this, the browser will automatically apply the dark mode for users that have it set, making the experience seamless (and state of the art).
Probably has something to do with having an all black background on desktop / IRC, terminals, steam since 1996/1997->now
Even MSN Gaming Zone where I started was 'dark moded'
I'm sure there are still plenty of people who would appreciate a site toggle for dark mode with a theme of your choosing.
The entire web is already light-mode first and much of it, including your site (no offense) offers zero built-in support for the provably massive demand that exists for dark-mode color schemes.
Calling their preference “normal” is annoying. Clearly the alternative is quite popular given that they want to complain about it.
Any good program allows color customization.
Dark mode looks better on CRTs and OLED, screens that have real darks.
At the same time I have pretty extreme myopia and astigmatism which, from what I’ve seen, makes me an ideal candidate for light mode.
On e-ink I 100% prefer light mode (dark text) to be preferable though.
Weird how argumentative people get about this though. Feels like vim/emacs level stuff.
And do test that the toggle works properly for syntax highlight code blocks: for some websites, the toggle does not change the color of the code block and I had to resort to Chrome's reader mode.
I tried many times to like it. When I used to have web conferences with my dev team, I'd have everyone use a light theme for their IDEs when I wanted to read code on their machines, because the clarity was so much better than with the dark themes.
Please consider the comfort of your users: sufficient contrast, sufficient text size, and when feasible, a choice of dark mode or light mode.
I've had to install Stylish just to have control over those websites that think they know better than me on what's good for my eyes.
Light mode sucks the same. I need contrast damn it. I need to be able to select my background and foreground color like in Win 95 (or X wimdows with Xt).
There's always a website, a person screensharing, a shared screenshot or something else that is light, and it WILL bother you if everything else is set to dark.
A dark thing in otherwise light settings doesn't produce the same issue, therefore adapting your settings for light work is more protective.
My main issue has been finding good light color schemes, particularly for neovim. Most have awful ideas like light yellow colors over light background, that I suspect come from just porting the dark mode to a light background as an afterthought. All of the themes I use have a few adjustments in my config.
At least in Firefox, pasting into the search bar kills all formatting. This motion is easier than it sounds and you can do it really quickly. Or, you can just use shift like the sibling suggests, but I never remember and it seems to still fail at other things
[1] With the exception of that weird Windows 11 theme option that keeps the main window content 'light' yet turns most OS affordances 'dark' -- that one is oddly pleasing...
Unless I want to emulate a Solaris console, which has a lovely font.
I love dark mode, and I don't like light mode. Everything is dark mode on my machines, day and night.
I find it stupid to have so much light beamed into my face, and I prefer to only light up the useful signal. The letters and numbers, and graphs. The 99% of background is of no interest and as such it doesn't need to send light to my face.
What I found is that using light mode, reducing screen brightness, adequate ambient lighting, and applying a brown filter works really well. Each of these components add an immediate relief when I'm applying them.
Funny thing is, I'm experimenting with dark mode in some places. In my KDE, it seems to work well for me in general OS UI, and in my file manager. Also works well on my phone after dark.
What I especially dislike is the mixing of dark and light modes. For example, when everything is light mode, only the terminal, and the IDE are dark. Fuck that. For this reason, for many years, I had my terminal in light mode as well.
What us dark-mode haters are really asking for is a simple option to click.
It's also easily configured in Firefox.
Also, the dark mode setting in mist browsers is one search entry away. I really don't see the problem here
I think most users are capable of that :)
Then my screen time started affecting my sleep so I still use dark mode at night
But anyways all software should be configurable and follow the parent software (browser, OS) by default, css even allows for that now. There is even a "prefers-contrast" property in order to design for people who need high contrast stuff.
I’d recommend this classic for a read: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/15142/whic...
Tl;dr dark text on a light background is usually easiest to read. Note in dark mode, you often see font bolded to compensate for the readability drop.
Almost ever major website dosent use dark backgrounds for text for a reason.
I personally like a dark mode UI (menu bars, dock, and so on), so it’s less distracting, but light mode for content.
With Dark Mode.
Just correctly executing on color scheme is a lot of work. It seems obvious that 2 themes will be 2x the work.
There is a lot of images that will require 2x the work if you want to it correctly. Let’s say screenshots of an UI in a tutorial.
> If normal mode bothers you so much, it says one thing: your ambient lighting is crap
It's easier to change software than the sun. Neither its brightness nor when its up or down.
Wikipedia, why the fuck do you have "auto" if it's not the default? I've never wanted to slap someone in the face so much.
But seriously, we can detect the desktop setting trivially. We have options!
We can both win here!
There's no reason for a war here, yet one still exists. Light mode sucks because the designers suck. Stop being so lazy. The vast majority of templates have an auto toggle! You have to go out of your way to remove it. If you're going to do things by hand, you have even less of an excuse. There's no "one size fits all" and it's clear there's significant numbers of people that like both styles. So do the "hard" work, especially when its not hard
Stop being so lazy.
And if you're mad at me calling you lazy for not adding the option, then you'll be more mad to know I think you're the problem.