Re:Safari introduces Adaptive Dark Mode in 27.3
by cosmotic on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @05:25PM
(#50359118)
Windows 3 through windows 7 had pervasive support for dark mode as long as application developers didn't custom paint their user interfaces. Application developers started out almost all supporting system colors and gradually over the next 25 years or so started implementing their own custom-drawn interfaces, accelerated by embedded IE/mshtml views and then later even more by Electron. This concluded with practically zero interfaces supporting the system color scheme.
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Re:Safari introduces Adaptive Dark Mode in 27.3
by toyg on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:08PM
(#50359492)
Yeah, when dark mode became "a thing" my first reaction was "...didn't we have this already?"
Re:Safari introduces Adaptive Dark Mode in 27.3
by da_chicken on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:12PM
(#50359526)
Yeah but "dark mode" for Win3 through WinXP was primarily to support passive matrix LCDs, which required inverted color schemes to appear black-on-white. That is why the built-in "high contrast" color schemes look so aggressively awful.
Re:Safari introduces Adaptive Dark Mode in 27.3
by pxoe on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @01:26PM
(#50369567)
In lieu of actual system wide dark mode for everything in Windows 10, even those awful "inverted" color schemes were useful and quite bearable after adjusting colors a bit (like this one for example https://github.com/nitschis/GreyEveTheme ), so it was at least better than nothing. It's no longer a problem in 11 though.
Re:Safari introduces Adaptive Dark Mode in 27.3
by Rohansi on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:17PM
(#50360048)
Custom painting isn't the only thing that broke it. You can customize the style (colors) of the native widgets to get a desired look but IIRC you could choose from system colors (follows the theme/mode automatically) or exact colors. Some applications used a mix of them which made the UI look awful if you switched away from whatever the default theme was.