Dark mode – which swaps the standard white background for black – has become the de facto display option for the most health-conscious internauts.

Dark mode isn't as good for your eyes as you believe

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Style Pass

2022-06-21 19:00:06

Dark mode – which swaps the standard white background for black – has become the de facto display option for the most health-conscious internauts. Like pulling down the shades or donning sunglasses, dark mode invites a slightly subversive, Mr Robot-esque feel. Indeed, blackout displays have always been the mode of choice among developers assembling code late into the night.

But dark mode is democratising. It’s now available on Android phones and Apple’s Mojave operating system, as well as a host of apps including Microsoft Outlook, Safari, Reddit, YouTube, Gmail and Reddit (a full list of websites offering dark mode can be found here). Responding to complaints that its dark navy dark mode wasn’t dark enough, Twitter rolled out a true dark mode dubbed ‘Lights out’ earlier in 2019.

A big driver of dark mode is aesthetics. One Twitter user’s assessment: “Night mode Twitter just 1000% more dope than regular one”, is pretty representative of the internet’s reaction to dark mode. Spotify, which selected a dark background as its standard mode, chose this look after testing different designs on its users, who were overwhelmingly in favour of this shady aesthetic. “We believe that when you have music or art that’s very colourful and very artistic, and you have beautiful cover art for music, that it really shows more clearly visible in a product like this, when it’s about entertainment,” Michelle Kadir, director of product development at Spotify, told Fast Company.