I upgraded my 2021 M1 MacBook and my months old M4 Pro work MacBook to Tahoe, and both have been sluggish, oddly enough the work MacBook more so (although that's probably due to the amount of...
I upgraded my 2021 M1 MacBook and my months old M4 Pro work MacBook to Tahoe, and both have been sluggish, oddly enough the work MacBook more so (although that's probably due to the amount of background stuff IT installs).
I agree with the author, there are parts of Tahoe that look really nice, like the new icons or the tabs in Safari. There are parts that are such a cool effect they distract, like the "plus" button on spaces when you hover over it refracts the background in such a cool way. And then there are parts that are just plain ugly or unusable, like the control panel over a solid color or the inconsistent border radiuses.
As for me, I'll just keep using my personal MacBook with Fedora.
Pretty well! It's definitely holds up as a daily driver, performance is good and nearly everything is supported now. Installation is very straightforward. Only gotchas that really remain at this...
Pretty well! It's definitely holds up as a daily driver, performance is good and nearly everything is supported now. Installation is very straightforward.
Only gotchas that really remain at this point are a lower battery life than Mac OS (not horrible, but not as good), no video out from USB C (my laptop has HDMI so not a issue) and by default the screen is doesn't use the top part with the notch (you can enable via kernel flag).
I have a lot of mixed feelings about Apple. I've been using Macs since the late '80s, and iPhones since the second gen. I'm fully locked into their ecosystem. Apple is doing a lot of things very...
I have a lot of mixed feelings about Apple. I've been using Macs since the late '80s, and iPhones since the second gen. I'm fully locked into their ecosystem.
Apple is doing a lot of things very well: Their hardware design is unparalleled, and their focus on security and privacy are commendable. By and large, Apple products continue to "just work" out of the box with minimal configuration or fuss. Power users (like myself) are inclined to complain about things like SIP, app permissions management, and app quarantine behavior, but honestly the downsides to those are overblown and they do provide real safety that we shouldn't take for granted, however annoying they might be. Generally I'm really satisfied with all these aspects of the Apple world.
Frankly their software has largely sucked for a long time. I'm talking back to iTunes and the earliest versions of Safari. Have you tried using the Photos app on a Mac? How about Apple Mail or Shortcuts? The Podcasts app for iOS has been a laughingstock since its release. These apps are dogged not just by ugly UIs, but by poor information architecture, inconsistent UX, and seemingly no performance optimization. They feel buggy, laggy, and don't behave the way users expect. Quality assurance seems like a pretty low priority for software at Apple, and they're famously bad at responding to bug reports submitted by users.
So yeah, I'm disappointed to see that the Liquid Glass release is worsening this when Apple could spend real resources from its infinite pocketbook to make these things substantially better. We have to conclude that they just don't care. But ultimately cleaning up this current mess would be a huge engineering feat... the appearance of buttons and overlays is just the visible part of an iceberg of technical debt and legacy design decisions.
And vendor lock-in is real. I'm not leaving the walled garden because the things they're doing right continue to outweigh the things they aren't. I'm sure Apple knows this and factors it into its calculus. I largely avoid the 1st party software wherever I can because there are so many great alternatives, and I can hold my nose on the occasions I have to change something in System Preferences Settings or do something in the Finder. For the kind of tasks I do — frontend dev work, nodejs and docker, lots of random CLI things, media production, local genAI, light retro gaming — the Mac continues to be ideal for me despite its rough edges.
But I will be waiting for a .2 or .3 update before I take the plunge on updating my phone or laptop to a 26 version. There's no need to rush into the current offering, knowing that at least some cleanup is on the way. The old OSes still work fine, in the meantime.
It’s interesting that you mention Mail, because it along with Calendar and others are one of the reasons why Apple platforms are sticky for me. Competitors can’t seem to ship good service-agnostic...
It’s interesting that you mention Mail, because it along with Calendar and others are one of the reasons why Apple platforms are sticky for me. Competitors can’t seem to ship good service-agnostic standards-based apps like Apple’s if their lives depended on it. You instead get apps that heavily push first party services like Outlook and Gmail.
Heck even the Linux world isn’t great here, but instead of pushing services the apps are just mediocre (Thunderbird, Evolution, etc have never impressed me).
I think you spotted the key thing right here. When the app isn’t just a portal for Apple to lock you into an Apple service it works super well. Then you have iTunes/Music. . . Then there’s stuff...
service agnostic standards based apps
I think you spotted the key thing right here. When the app isn’t just a portal for Apple to lock you into an Apple service it works super well. Then you have iTunes/Music. . .
Then there’s stuff like Photos where there just aren’t well accepted standards for how any of it ought to work. It ends up committing the sins of both trying to do too much and be too clever for basic users while lacking important features that pro users would care about, satisfying no one.
A lot of sins I think come down to their aversion to just exposing the file system. One of my favorite things about old time iTunes was that once you put your music in it the software literally arranged it for you into a very sensible directory structure based on the tags on the file. It wasn’t just an index that it creates, it literally had all your MP3s in a library that it organized and you could just right click on the entry in iTunes and it would take you straight to the file in it’s folder. The application was very clearly a database with some buttons on top to do the music functions and it was not shy about letting you know this. You intuitively understood the data model it was working with just from interacting with it. Nothing works like this anymore. I don’t think most UI designers they have even know what a data model or file system even IS anymore!
The stuff that does work well are the applications that you know senior Apple executives are in every day. Mail, calendar, notes. Stuff where they care about how it works and what it does and they don’t have a bunch of fake KPIs to decide if it’s good.
This is still pretty close to how it works. I didn't do any special setup for my iTunes library, and I just have a "music" folder that separates all the files in my library by...
One of my favorite things about old time iTunes was that once you put your music in it the software literally arranged it for you into a very sensible directory structure based on the tags on the file.
This is still pretty close to how it works. I didn't do any special setup for my iTunes library, and I just have a "music" folder that separates all the files in my library by .../artist/album/track.wav
As long as you only ever interact with iTunes as a music player for playing a library tracks on your device that’s true. But they sort of throw everything from downloaded tracks from the streaming...
As long as you only ever interact with iTunes as a music player for playing a library tracks on your device that’s true. But they sort of throw everything from downloaded tracks from the streaming service to iTunes Match tracks from other devices that are synced through the cloud to albums being directly streamed off of Apple Music all into the same UI in a way that is extremely confusing. It’s basically impossible to keep track of where the music playing off your device right now lives, which consequently makes it really hard to manage a personal library of music files if you also stream or use iTunes Match at all.
Same here. Calendar and Mail are such a joy and surprisingly unique. Thunderbird, the second best option, is heavy and ugly (although it works fine) and other than that, there’s basically nothing...
Same here. Calendar and Mail are such a joy and surprisingly unique. Thunderbird, the second best option, is heavy and ugly (although it works fine) and other than that, there’s basically nothing comparable. Such an overlook on two of the most basic apps. I suspect for most people these apps were replaced by web-based ones, so no one cares.
I could probably get by on service vendor apps if I had to but juggling those becomes a real pain when you're using multiple providers. That too is probably mostly a power user thing though, I get...
I could probably get by on service vendor apps if I had to but juggling those becomes a real pain when you're using multiple providers. That too is probably mostly a power user thing though, I get the impression that most folks do absolutely everything through a single address.
Fair callout, I haven't actually tried Mail on Mac since it was first released. It may be much better now. I'm a Thunderbird user personally and I agree with @rodrigo that it's quite ugly and...
Fair callout, I haven't actually tried Mail on Mac since it was first released. It may be much better now. I'm a Thunderbird user personally and I agree with @rodrigo that it's quite ugly and clunky too. I do use Mail on iOS and it's... fine?
I've been using Mail on OS X since version 10.0 or thereabouts and it's always been good for me, but mail clients seems like one of those things that people have strong opinions about due to their...
I've been using Mail on OS X since version 10.0 or thereabouts and it's always been good for me, but mail clients seems like one of those things that people have strong opinions about due to their personal nature.
And yeah, "fine" is a good descriptor, but everything else falls below that bar so here we are.
Re: Mail, I replaced it with Superhuman and haven’t been disappointed once. While the Mail app is okay, it lacks some productivity features and its more recent UI update, as I saw on my wife’s...
Re: Mail, I replaced it with Superhuman and haven’t been disappointed once. While the Mail app is okay, it lacks some productivity features and its more recent UI update, as I saw on my wife’s phone, really appeared like a step backward.
I use the default Podcasts app and have no complains as well. There was a rough transition to the current version (I guess in iOS 16?), but after that it got really good and intuitive. I've tried...
I use the default Podcasts app and have no complains as well. There was a rough transition to the current version (I guess in iOS 16?), but after that it got really good and intuitive. I've tried a lot of alternatives (Overcast, Pocket Casts, Castro), none of them better than Apple Podcasts (IMHO, obviously).
I have an iPhone 12 and a 2021 MacBook Pro. I haven’t noticed the performance issues the author describes - Tahoe has been smooth since spotlight finished indexing, and my phone has not gotten...
I have an iPhone 12 and a 2021 MacBook Pro. I haven’t noticed the performance issues the author describes - Tahoe has been smooth since spotlight finished indexing, and my phone has not gotten noticeably worse since the update.
Surely the new animations are wasteful in terms of performance and battery, but I think we can allow this sort of thing as technology progresses. I wonder if reducing transparency and motion would noticeably improve performance?
It definitely depends on taste. I mostly like Liquid Glass, but Tahoe sucks compared to iOS 26. It’s really inconsistent and this makes it much more distracting - plus the bugs. Really hope we get a lot of improvements soon through updates.
Before smartphones, a cellphone only needed to be plugged in approximately once a week. I kinda miss not having to worry about caring a charging cable and/or a power brick anytime I'm away from...
I think we can allow this sort of thing as technology progresses
Before smartphones, a cellphone only needed to be plugged in approximately once a week. I kinda miss not having to worry about caring a charging cable and/or a power brick anytime I'm away from home for more than 24 hours.
"It's ok to bloat because technology advances" is how we ended up with a huge digital divide between the haves and the have-nots. Particularly those whom cannot afford technology made within the last decade.
It would be nice if Apple used their massive lead in silicon over Android competitors to enable longer battery life (or at least, make it an optional mode). The latest iPhones are more powerful...
It would be nice if Apple used their massive lead in silicon over Android competitors to enable longer battery life (or at least, make it an optional mode).
The latest iPhones are more powerful than most M1 Macs, which is more than “good enough” — if there were a toggle in settings that downclocked the system to power levels similar to e.g. Google Pixels (about half as powerful) most people wouldn’t notice the difference in day to day tasks but battery life would almost certainly see a big jump.
They are already doing that though. The iPhone Air has better performance and better battery life than the Pixel 10 Pro while having a smaller battery size.
They are already doing that though. The iPhone Air has better performance and better battery life than the Pixel 10 Pro while having a smaller battery size.
Not quite. Low power mode doesn’t just downlock the SoC but also reduces the screen’s refresh rate and throttles radios among other things, which is a little too far for most people since it makes...
Not quite. Low power mode doesn’t just downlock the SoC but also reduces the screen’s refresh rate and throttles radios among other things, which is a little too far for most people since it makes the phone perceptibly less pleasant to use. This hypothetical setting is more granular and aimed at saving power with minimal negative experience impact.
On my own site, I fought this by defaulting all styles to dark theming, then toggling light mode on manually via javascript on first page load, if the user doesn't already have a preference. CSS...
On my own site, I fought this by defaulting all styles to dark theming, then toggling light mode on manually via javascript on first page load, if the user doesn't already have a preference. CSS loads damn near immediately depending on your configuration, whereas javascript will always take some time to init. No light mode users complain about a "dark flash", but dark mode users certainly will notice if you do it the other way!
Not sure how relevant my experience is but with very simple sites I’ve found that pure CSS light/dark mode that’s configured to follow the user’s browser/OS configuration (as opposed to defaulting...
Not sure how relevant my experience is but with very simple sites I’ve found that pure CSS light/dark mode that’s configured to follow the user’s browser/OS configuration (as opposed to defaulting to dark) never does the flashbang thing either.
Yes, I strongly suggest just using prefers-color-scheme or light-dark() and foregoing the JS switcher. Fetching the theme preference via localStorage takes too long, and the page has already...
Yes, I strongly suggest just using prefers-color-scheme or light-dark() and foregoing the JS switcher. Fetching the theme preference via localStorage takes too long, and the page has already rendered by that point (resulting in a flash).
It's likely possible to delay the paint, but it's much easier to just follow the system's color preference.
I have seen it with a pure CSS solution, but I suspect that's only because I used a separate CSS file. I suspect that embedding it right on the page prevents a flash of unstyled content on...
I have seen it with a pure CSS solution, but I suspect that's only because I used a separate CSS file. I suspect that embedding it right on the page prevents a flash of unstyled content on particularly slow connections, like edge data.
In my experience it depends on what browser you're using. When I tried using Brave a long time ago it would flashbang all the time even when other browsers didn't
In my experience it depends on what browser you're using. When I tried using Brave a long time ago it would flashbang all the time even when other browsers didn't
Are there really that many dark mode users? We are in ~tech so the answer to this audience is probably that there's a lot - but generally speaking I never hear anyone talk about light or dark mode...
Are there really that many dark mode users?
We are in ~tech so the answer to this audience is probably that there's a lot - but generally speaking I never hear anyone talk about light or dark mode for anything at all
I’ve had a hard time using light mode ever since flat design became trendy, because suddenly light mode (standard) themes shifted away from mid-grays and other mid-to-dark colors towards stark...
I’ve had a hard time using light mode ever since flat design became trendy, because suddenly light mode (standard) themes shifted away from mid-grays and other mid-to-dark colors towards stark whites and very light grays. It’s hard on the eyes unless you drop monitor brightness so much that you lose color vibrancy (on IPS panel monitors anyway).
Flat design light mode themes tend to have worse contrast than their dark counterparts too, for some reason. Like where in dark mode a slightly lighter background color might be used to signify a grouping light mode will either use a gray so light it’s barely distinguishable or forego the grouping color altogether.
So these days the only time light mode gets used is when I’m on a laptop in an area getting blasted with natural light where it’s the only way to cut through the glare.
Personal IT anecdote: In my experience zoomers and millenials use dark mode more often than light mode, whereas gen x onward uses light mode more often that dark mode. I'd say the inflection point...
Personal IT anecdote:
In my experience zoomers and millenials use dark mode more often than light mode, whereas gen x onward uses light mode more often that dark mode. I'd say the inflection point is somewhere in the early-mid millenial generation.
Among the younger generations, I've seen more men using dark mode, and more women using light mode. Further, in that particular age group, the usage of dark mode also correlated significantly with someone identifying thmeselves as a (PC?) Gamer. Possibly due to being used to it thanks to Steam and Discord, even if they weren't tech people
This has not been my experience as I am late Gen X and most people I know around my age prefer dark mode. We're both just exchanging anecdotes here, so obviously it proves nothing. If anything, I...
This has not been my experience as I am late Gen X and most people I know around my age prefer dark mode. We're both just exchanging anecdotes here, so obviously it proves nothing. If anything, I actually think my early usage of terminals and DOS may be why I like a dark theme and always have my for editors.
I started computers in the mid-90s on a Mac, but for code editors switched to dark themes as soon as I found out it was an option primarily because syntax coloration “pops” much better in dark...
I started computers in the mid-90s on a Mac, but for code editors switched to dark themes as soon as I found out it was an option primarily because syntax coloration “pops” much better in dark themes, making fragments easier to visually latch onto. In light themes the coloration kinda gets washed away in the sea of brightness unless you use garish primary colors.
Yes? I'd say at least a third of my non-technical friends and family use dark mode and most of the technical ones do. Topically, most the people that prefer light mode favor Apple devices.
Yes? I'd say at least a third of my non-technical friends and family use dark mode and most of the technical ones do. Topically, most the people that prefer light mode favor Apple devices.
I upgraded my 2021 M1 MacBook and my months old M4 Pro work MacBook to Tahoe, and both have been sluggish, oddly enough the work MacBook more so (although that's probably due to the amount of background stuff IT installs).
I agree with the author, there are parts of Tahoe that look really nice, like the new icons or the tabs in Safari. There are parts that are such a cool effect they distract, like the "plus" button on spaces when you hover over it refracts the background in such a cool way. And then there are parts that are just plain ugly or unusable, like the control panel over a solid color or the inconsistent border radiuses.
As for me, I'll just keep using my personal MacBook with Fedora.
How is that going? I'm seriously considering a change for Linux…
Pretty well! It's definitely holds up as a daily driver, performance is good and nearly everything is supported now. Installation is very straightforward.
Only gotchas that really remain at this point are a lower battery life than Mac OS (not horrible, but not as good), no video out from USB C (my laptop has HDMI so not a issue) and by default the screen is doesn't use the top part with the notch (you can enable via kernel flag).
I have a lot of mixed feelings about Apple. I've been using Macs since the late '80s, and iPhones since the second gen. I'm fully locked into their ecosystem.
Apple is doing a lot of things very well: Their hardware design is unparalleled, and their focus on security and privacy are commendable. By and large, Apple products continue to "just work" out of the box with minimal configuration or fuss. Power users (like myself) are inclined to complain about things like SIP, app permissions management, and app quarantine behavior, but honestly the downsides to those are overblown and they do provide real safety that we shouldn't take for granted, however annoying they might be. Generally I'm really satisfied with all these aspects of the Apple world.
Frankly their software has largely sucked for a long time. I'm talking back to iTunes and the earliest versions of Safari. Have you tried using the Photos app on a Mac? How about Apple Mail or Shortcuts? The Podcasts app for iOS has been a laughingstock since its release. These apps are dogged not just by ugly UIs, but by poor information architecture, inconsistent UX, and seemingly no performance optimization. They feel buggy, laggy, and don't behave the way users expect. Quality assurance seems like a pretty low priority for software at Apple, and they're famously bad at responding to bug reports submitted by users.
So yeah, I'm disappointed to see that the Liquid Glass release is worsening this when Apple could spend real resources from its infinite pocketbook to make these things substantially better. We have to conclude that they just don't care. But ultimately cleaning up this current mess would be a huge engineering feat... the appearance of buttons and overlays is just the visible part of an iceberg of technical debt and legacy design decisions.
And vendor lock-in is real. I'm not leaving the walled garden because the things they're doing right continue to outweigh the things they aren't. I'm sure Apple knows this and factors it into its calculus. I largely avoid the 1st party software wherever I can because there are so many great alternatives, and I can hold my nose on the occasions I have to change something in System
PreferencesSettings or do something in the Finder. For the kind of tasks I do — frontend dev work, nodejs and docker, lots of random CLI things, media production, local genAI, light retro gaming — the Mac continues to be ideal for me despite its rough edges.But I will be waiting for a
.2or.3update before I take the plunge on updating my phone or laptop to a 26 version. There's no need to rush into the current offering, knowing that at least some cleanup is on the way. The old OSes still work fine, in the meantime.It’s interesting that you mention Mail, because it along with Calendar and others are one of the reasons why Apple platforms are sticky for me. Competitors can’t seem to ship good service-agnostic standards-based apps like Apple’s if their lives depended on it. You instead get apps that heavily push first party services like Outlook and Gmail.
Heck even the Linux world isn’t great here, but instead of pushing services the apps are just mediocre (Thunderbird, Evolution, etc have never impressed me).
I think you spotted the key thing right here. When the app isn’t just a portal for Apple to lock you into an Apple service it works super well. Then you have iTunes/Music. . .
Then there’s stuff like Photos where there just aren’t well accepted standards for how any of it ought to work. It ends up committing the sins of both trying to do too much and be too clever for basic users while lacking important features that pro users would care about, satisfying no one.
A lot of sins I think come down to their aversion to just exposing the file system. One of my favorite things about old time iTunes was that once you put your music in it the software literally arranged it for you into a very sensible directory structure based on the tags on the file. It wasn’t just an index that it creates, it literally had all your MP3s in a library that it organized and you could just right click on the entry in iTunes and it would take you straight to the file in it’s folder. The application was very clearly a database with some buttons on top to do the music functions and it was not shy about letting you know this. You intuitively understood the data model it was working with just from interacting with it. Nothing works like this anymore. I don’t think most UI designers they have even know what a data model or file system even IS anymore!
The stuff that does work well are the applications that you know senior Apple executives are in every day. Mail, calendar, notes. Stuff where they care about how it works and what it does and they don’t have a bunch of fake KPIs to decide if it’s good.
This is still pretty close to how it works. I didn't do any special setup for my iTunes library, and I just have a "music" folder that separates all the files in my library by .../artist/album/track.wav
As long as you only ever interact with iTunes as a music player for playing a library tracks on your device that’s true. But they sort of throw everything from downloaded tracks from the streaming service to iTunes Match tracks from other devices that are synced through the cloud to albums being directly streamed off of Apple Music all into the same UI in a way that is extremely confusing. It’s basically impossible to keep track of where the music playing off your device right now lives, which consequently makes it really hard to manage a personal library of music files if you also stream or use iTunes Match at all.
Same here. Calendar and Mail are such a joy and surprisingly unique. Thunderbird, the second best option, is heavy and ugly (although it works fine) and other than that, there’s basically nothing comparable. Such an overlook on two of the most basic apps. I suspect for most people these apps were replaced by web-based ones, so no one cares.
I could probably get by on service vendor apps if I had to but juggling those becomes a real pain when you're using multiple providers. That too is probably mostly a power user thing though, I get the impression that most folks do absolutely everything through a single address.
Fair callout, I haven't actually tried Mail on Mac since it was first released. It may be much better now. I'm a Thunderbird user personally and I agree with @rodrigo that it's quite ugly and clunky too. I do use Mail on iOS and it's... fine?
I've been using Mail on OS X since version 10.0 or thereabouts and it's always been good for me, but mail clients seems like one of those things that people have strong opinions about due to their personal nature.
And yeah, "fine" is a good descriptor, but everything else falls below that bar so here we are.
Re: Mail, I replaced it with Superhuman and haven’t been disappointed once. While the Mail app is okay, it lacks some productivity features and its more recent UI update, as I saw on my wife’s phone, really appeared like a step backward.
I find it to be fine? Works a lot better than Spotify for podcasts, and have never had a problem with it.
I use the default Podcasts app and have no complains as well. There was a rough transition to the current version (I guess in iOS 16?), but after that it got really good and intuitive. I've tried a lot of alternatives (Overcast, Pocket Casts, Castro), none of them better than Apple Podcasts (IMHO, obviously).
I have an iPhone 12 and a 2021 MacBook Pro. I haven’t noticed the performance issues the author describes - Tahoe has been smooth since spotlight finished indexing, and my phone has not gotten noticeably worse since the update.
Surely the new animations are wasteful in terms of performance and battery, but I think we can allow this sort of thing as technology progresses. I wonder if reducing transparency and motion would noticeably improve performance?
It definitely depends on taste. I mostly like Liquid Glass, but Tahoe sucks compared to iOS 26. It’s really inconsistent and this makes it much more distracting - plus the bugs. Really hope we get a lot of improvements soon through updates.
Before smartphones, a cellphone only needed to be plugged in approximately once a week. I kinda miss not having to worry about caring a charging cable and/or a power brick anytime I'm away from home for more than 24 hours.
"It's ok to bloat because technology advances" is how we ended up with a huge digital divide between the haves and the have-nots. Particularly those whom cannot afford technology made within the last decade.
It would be nice if Apple used their massive lead in silicon over Android competitors to enable longer battery life (or at least, make it an optional mode).
The latest iPhones are more powerful than most M1 Macs, which is more than “good enough” — if there were a toggle in settings that downclocked the system to power levels similar to e.g. Google Pixels (about half as powerful) most people wouldn’t notice the difference in day to day tasks but battery life would almost certainly see a big jump.
They are already doing that though. The iPhone Air has better performance and better battery life than the Pixel 10 Pro while having a smaller battery size.
Right, but I'm saying add a toggle that cuts performance down to Pixel 10 Pro levels to push the battery life that much further.
Is that not just low power mode?
Not quite. Low power mode doesn’t just downlock the SoC but also reduces the screen’s refresh rate and throttles radios among other things, which is a little too far for most people since it makes the phone perceptibly less pleasant to use. This hypothetical setting is more granular and aimed at saving power with minimal negative experience impact.
Even if it does, reducing transparency and/or increasing contrast turns Tahoe's look and feel (more) awful.
I didn't read the article yet, but it's annoying that any load of the page flashbangs one before immediately going into dark mode.
Oh, I wasn't aware of this issue. (I only use light mode.) Thanks for pointing it out. Now I'll try to fix this bug.
On my own site, I fought this by defaulting all styles to dark theming, then toggling light mode on manually via javascript on first page load, if the user doesn't already have a preference. CSS loads damn near immediately depending on your configuration, whereas javascript will always take some time to init. No light mode users complain about a "dark flash", but dark mode users certainly will notice if you do it the other way!
Not sure how relevant my experience is but with very simple sites I’ve found that pure CSS light/dark mode that’s configured to follow the user’s browser/OS configuration (as opposed to defaulting to dark) never does the flashbang thing either.
Yes, I strongly suggest just using
prefers-color-schemeorlight-dark()and foregoing the JS switcher. Fetching the theme preference via localStorage takes too long, and the page has already rendered by that point (resulting in a flash).It's likely possible to delay the paint, but it's much easier to just follow the system's color preference.
I have seen it with a pure CSS solution, but I suspect that's only because I used a separate CSS file. I suspect that embedding it right on the page prevents a flash of unstyled content on particularly slow connections, like edge data.
In my experience it depends on what browser you're using. When I tried using Brave a long time ago it would flashbang all the time even when other browsers didn't
Are there really that many dark mode users?
We are in ~tech so the answer to this audience is probably that there's a lot - but generally speaking I never hear anyone talk about light or dark mode for anything at all
I’ve had a hard time using light mode ever since flat design became trendy, because suddenly light mode (standard) themes shifted away from mid-grays and other mid-to-dark colors towards stark whites and very light grays. It’s hard on the eyes unless you drop monitor brightness so much that you lose color vibrancy (on IPS panel monitors anyway).
Flat design light mode themes tend to have worse contrast than their dark counterparts too, for some reason. Like where in dark mode a slightly lighter background color might be used to signify a grouping light mode will either use a gray so light it’s barely distinguishable or forego the grouping color altogether.
So these days the only time light mode gets used is when I’m on a laptop in an area getting blasted with natural light where it’s the only way to cut through the glare.
Personal IT anecdote:
In my experience zoomers and millenials use dark mode more often than light mode, whereas gen x onward uses light mode more often that dark mode. I'd say the inflection point is somewhere in the early-mid millenial generation.
Among the younger generations, I've seen more men using dark mode, and more women using light mode. Further, in that particular age group, the usage of dark mode also correlated significantly with someone identifying thmeselves as a (PC?) Gamer. Possibly due to being used to it thanks to Steam and Discord, even if they weren't tech people
This has not been my experience as I am late Gen X and most people I know around my age prefer dark mode. We're both just exchanging anecdotes here, so obviously it proves nothing. If anything, I actually think my early usage of terminals and DOS may be why I like a dark theme and always have my for editors.
I started computers in the mid-90s on a Mac, but for code editors switched to dark themes as soon as I found out it was an option primarily because syntax coloration “pops” much better in dark themes, making fragments easier to visually latch onto. In light themes the coloration kinda gets washed away in the sea of brightness unless you use garish primary colors.
I completely agree with the color thing. I've just always preferred dark background, lighter colored text.
Green on black for days.
Yes? I'd say at least a third of my non-technical friends and family use dark mode and most of the technical ones do. Topically, most the people that prefer light mode favor Apple devices.
I usually have light/dark sync with sunrise/sunset to ease eye strain.