The trend against skueuomorphism maybe equally relevant: that early example is a descendant of Apple's previous brushed-metal UI. Though even among the flat ones there's been a trend toward lightening.
It'd also be interesting to see what area the author picked on each screenshot: a big difference, at least before Tahoe, if you decide that the Finder sidebar or top bar is what you're going to look at.
The reason Light Mode has been getting lighter is simple: because the default computer in 2025 is now a laptop or phone, whereas in 2009 it was a desktop.
Laptops and phones have easy and relatively coarse brightness adjustment settings for their screens. Desktops didn't, and still don't.
So it makes sense that you'd just make whites as bright as possible- if the user doesn't like that, they can just turn the brightness down. Otherwise you're just kind of leaving the monitor's available/potential contrast on the table.
Note that Dark Modes skyrocketed in popularity after the default computer changed from being a desktop to a laptop- but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through).
The next change to this trend will occur, specifically to Dark Mode, 1-2 years after the average machine a software designer is issued for work has an OLED screen- because OLED screens actually can get that dim, the current color balance will likely be inappropriate.
You know what sucks? They do. Desktops do. They have since the late 90s.
Microsoft just never implemented it. Most desktop displays happily respond to brightness commands from the OS over DDCCI.
No. 70% white backgrounds allowed light and dark contrast elements. 100% white backgrounds do not.
Things people born after Macintosh say.
I didn’t call it dark mode though!
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Hard_res...
Which is #AAAAAA on #000000 to you kids with your fancy Super VGA monitors with megabytes of video memory and 24-bit color.
This white background stuff is the invention of Microsoft or somebody's marketing department, who decided people would be less afraid of computers if they made the screen look like a piece of paper.
Back in my day we only used 16 colors at a time [2], because you had to quarter the resolution if you wanted more than that, because of course video memory has to fit in a 64k segment -- why would anyone even want to go bigger, wouldn't that consume way too much conventional memory? And if you did decide you wanted to use 8-bit mode, if you wanted square pixels you had to read Michael Abrash's book and do terrible black magic involving directly programming VGA registers and bank-switched bit-planes.
If you don't know what any of that means, it means you kids've got it way too easy these days and don't even know it. The real programmers who knew all this stuff and made brilliant masterpieces like Master of Magic and the original X-COM were scattered to the winds when the original Microprose folded. Now get off my lawn.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic#/media/File:QBasic_Open...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#With_an...
>Things people born after Macintosh say.
Things people born after teleprompters say.
Sometimes I think the most hate for light mode is from people without autobrightness in their displays. Or from those who don’t know how to change it easily.
Sure, if I were to constantly blind myself with 10k lux, I would hate white background too.
But it isn’t supposed to be like that: make it the same brightness as the surroundings and voila.
I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.
Also with glossy display (like 6k xdr) the only way I can deal with reflections is by always using light mode. Alabaster code theme is my favorite.
If you don’t have auto brightness, there are many apps to change it easily via UI or keyboard instead of manual knobs of your monitor — most of them for the past 10 years support control via hdmi/displayport
—
I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume — every soundtrack should be lounge cafe del mar.” Or “I use this browser extension to make everything 5% loud.”
Well, just turn down the volume knob, dummy.
Books don't emit light. They reflect it. That's the difference.
Irritation comes from the difference in brightness.
Regardless though, due to the design inconsistencies of the system, one screen is too bright that causes to reduce the brightness and another one uses literally 1/1,000,000 contrast difference between tabs to distinguish the active one, so it’s impossible to get a base brightness correct.
I’m using a MacBook Pro M4 and as I move around the house, automatic brightness either tries to blind me despite I’ve been in a dark room for a minute, or simply refuses to turn the brightness up when the sun is shining down into the room. It’s certainly designed for a certain environment, but not definitely a home.
I usually work with darkmode at home, and light mode in the office because our office is basically the surface of the sun.
I love books. But I also have a brain-vision disability that makes it so that I physically struggle to read black text on a white background.
If I could get books inverted, I would.
The problem persists, however, because as the linked posts notes light mode is far brighter than it used to be, and now if I crank brightness down low enough to feel comfortable I'm sacrificing contrast and color vividness to such a degree that (for me) it's actively distracting. So, dark mode on high brightness it is.
For code editing, I've always tended towards dark themes ever since they became readily available in IDEs in the late 2000s simply because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme. When I use a light theme for code editing it feels almost like staring at a sheet of undifferentiated text in comparison.
That’s why I mentioned alabaster: the only thing it highlights is comments and constants.
Nowadays I can’t stand “normal” themes even for a minute: they are like blinking Christmas lights for me, too much distraction.
Imaging reading the book where each word has different colors for nouns, verbs, what have you — nuts! :-)
Also check this: https://tonsky.me/blog/syntax-highlighting/
In a competent highlighting scheme, you have enough differentiation that every distinct type of thing indeed has a different way it pops.
You don’t see a for loop? Or don’t know where is the variable and where is the method? The list goes on. Never in my life I need a color to differentiate between a class name and a variable (they already differ in first-letter case). Or between language keyword and a variable (I’m not 5, I know those keywords by heart).
There is a reason we use nouns for variables, verbs for methods, stuff like isReady or hasAccess for booleans and what have you.
Color is overrated (or rather very nice for stuff that matters: like comments).
A dark background reduces total brightness without that effect.
The interesting thing is, I’ve noticed when I read white on black and look elsewhere I see horizontal lines in my vision. So really I’m the one who should be shouting about their eyes. Maybe that’s just me, though?
I guess I want my computing experience to be like that of reading a book. Not sure I’d like white text on black paper.
I like my code editor to respect my OS which automatically changes from light to dark mode when the sun sets.
I guess it's like looking at a slatted window blind with a sunny day behind it, when you look away your eyes will see the remnants of the bright lines. Whereas if you're staring at a bright surface (a screen on light mode), the entire scope of vision is dimmed...
If the majority was using dark mode, I’d imagine we’d see operating systems show dark mode as their default screenshots and ship as the default. We don’t see that.
When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
Interesting how experiences differ. I've found dark mode contrast to generally be a bit better than that of light mode because for some reason designers tend to employ a wider spread of colors with a higher delta between the lightest and darkest in those, whereas light mode themes tend to be stark white and two grays tops with those grays barely getting used at all.
So for example it's common for group boxes in dark mode to get a dedicated background color where under light mode they won't have a background and all and fall through the the parent's white background, causing content to all kind of blur together.
Thankfully HN has remained pleasingly off-white.
Hilarious how this downvoted comment proves it is not.
There should be a special place in hell for those light-grey-text-loving designers.
Light mode is masochism mode, with just a few exceptions: e-ink, highly lit environments (that are uncomfortable to work in anyways), people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better, and weirdos who enjoy staring at a flashlight. If you're gonna use that, might as well just turn down the screen brightness - but I agree with the author that perhaps a middle ground "gray theme" would be better, if slightly less attractive to UI designers.
Astigmatism is very common.
I have concluded that light mode is for light mode people and dark mode is for dark mode people. Making light mode a little darker or dark mode a little lighter isn’t going to change how people experience interfaces. Make light mode for light people and dark mode for dark mode people.
Maybe things are getting brighter, but it hasn’t been noticeable to me.
(Gosh, I feel old thinking about the possibility that someone who's been doing this for 20 years might still be too young to have ever used a CRT monitor.)
This could be correct if astigmatism was rare.[1]
[1] https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-access...
Kind of a particular instance of enshittification.
Neutral grey makes sense in two cases:
- Relative color schemes in which your elements can be either lighter or darker than the background.
- Precise color grading, because white and black backgrounds shift color perception too much.
If you feel the background is too bright, either add more light in the room, or reduce the monitor brightness. It's all relative, it physically cannot have too much absolute brightness to hurt your eyes. The daylight is orders of magnitude stronger but you have no problem with it because your eyes adapt. What hurts them is excessive contrast: staring at the monitor in the dark room, pure black color schemes on OLED screens, etc. This looks jarring and breaks eye adaptation.
It turns out bodies don't all respond the same way to the same stimuli. Sunny days cause me real pain. A thin layer of ground fog with bright sun above it is brutal for me, as is bright sun with snow on the ground. I feel so much more comfortable outside on a dark, cloudy day. My eye doctor tells me she frequently hears the same from others. Each of us has a different response curve to light levels.
Meanwhile:
- One of the two themes is always worse, but which one it is is different from application to application
- Despite the above, I'm required to decide globally whether I'm a "dark mode" or "light mode" person, with no option to just let the application or website decide on its own which theme is best.
- Because designers now need to support inverted contrast everywhere, everything has to be monochrome, including icons, text, backgrounds, etc.
I'd honestly rather people just picked one theme and directed their efforts towards making it look as good as possible. Or, you know, add support for real custom theming so I can make it look however I want.
Personally I love Windows XP because it's so colorful. The taskbar is blue. The start button is green. The window frame is blue, the close button is red. The sidebars are tinted yellow. Even icons like CD-roms aren't greyscale, but tinted purple instead.
Since then, people started removing color from everything. Colorful icons became monochrome, perhaps only so it could be easily switched from "light mode" to "dark mode" by switching their colors from black to white and vice-versa. Everything is now harder to see.
On Linux, most attempts to mimic retro GUIs fail because they can't tint different parts internal of a window of different colors, such as tinting only the sidebar a shade of yellow. This is rather ironic given that GTK's CSS theoretically could allow this. But in practice there is no stable public "API" for the classses used inside an application to allow users to re-style them easily with CSS. Even if I could do .sidebar { color: #ff0; }, I don't know the class name that my file manager used for its sidebar, for example, so I can't really do that.
In my opinion this the main reason modern UI's feel so bland and lifeless.
QuickBasic/QBasic/edit.com(and turbo pascal?) darkish blue background and grey text was just damn comfortable and why we turned our backs on it is beyond me.
Also, there’s just something about the graph of “Average brightness of MacOS screenshots over the years” and extrapolating it that tickles my brain. By 2030 MacOS light mode will just be a single white rectangle (with a notch). It reminds me of the “Number of youtube videos on the homepage” blog that extrapolates that by 2030 there will be 0 videos on the homepage.
There is no particular reason for that except habits. I started programming on black background terminals and the first anything else happened on Unix workstations or Windows PCs with white backgrounds.
I adjust the overall brightness of my screen according to the light level of the room and I use night mode. When I happen to use some other computer in dark mode it's usually too dark: white characters are often too thin and don't enjoy enough light to be readable. Maybe dark mode is for young eyes or for people that are very sensitive to glare.
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