tl;dr

Dark backgrounds are the best. But when one accidentally land somewhere with a light background with eyes trained for dark, it can hurt. So, one may as well just make everything light for consistency.

We love dark backgrounds. They are easier on the eyes, comfortable to work with in the night/dark rooms. So, we’d like everything that we see on the screen to be dark. And that’s the key, everything must be dark.

Imagine working on the computer with a completely dark environment. Every app configured to be at its darkest. You find the need to look something up on the web. No worries, the search engine supports dark mode, so that’s good. Hey, the 2nd search result is what you were looking for and you open it. Then, an extreme bright light hits you hard. The article is built with a white background, in a way that all your hacks to make (most) websites dark doesn’t work. The eyes hurt, the head hurts a bit.

I have faced this, multiple times. As someone who is extremely sensitive to brightness, sudden change is extra annoying. So, a few years ago, I had to switch everything to be light. With that, such events never happen.

I hope at some point dark backgrounds become the default everywhere. Or, users should be able to tell the browsers their dark/light mode preference, which can then be forwarded to websites. With that, I’d happily switch back to making everything dark.

Update

Now, this website supports dark mode based on a user’s system preference. It uses prefers-color-scheme media query to achieve that.

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  /*
   * Custom CSS code / overrides go here for dark mode go here.
   * They which will be applicable for users who have set `dark` as a
   * system color scheme.
   */
}

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