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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: What Is The Point Of Dark Mode?
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:57:02 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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I don’t know why everybody is embracing “Dark Mode” display settings
these days. Some say it’s for power saving, others say it’s easier on
the eyes. The only reason I’ve heard that makes sense is graphic
artists doing colour work use it (together with appropriately set-up
ambient lighting--important!) to get a more consistent viewing
environment, crucial for ensuring those colours come out correct. As
far as I’m concerned, everybody else is following a fad.

The “easier on the eyes” excuse is nonsense. I say this as someone
whose computing career began with CRT terminals that displayed light
text (or, if you were lucky, graphics) against a dark background. As
soon as the display technology allowed for dark text on a light
background, a lot of us made the switch, for the same reason that
printed paper usually has dark text on a light background, and not the
other way round: because it’s easier on the eyes.

Because, you see, to make light text on a dark background easier to
read, people tend to turn up the brightness. And this greater
brightness tends to tire out the eyes sooner. With a large, light
background, things remain comfortably readable at lower display
intensities.

In sum: small areas of text in lighter colour against large areas of
darker colour are harder to see than small areas of text in darker
colour against large areas of lighter colour, for the same pair of
lighter and darker colours. This is just inherent in the way the
physics of vision works.

This study
<https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/small-study-suggests-dark-mode-doesnt-save-much-power-for-very-human-reasons/>
may be a small one, but it demonstrates the phenomenon of users
turning up the brightness. They didn’t mention the eye-fatigue issue,
they were only looking at power saving. So the power-saving excuse
doesn’t seem to pan out either; but we know from previous experience
that the eye-fatigue issue will still happen.