Two weeks ago, Microsoft introduced a dark mode to the its Outlook.com web mail service. According to the reports reaching us from our sources, the company had at first teased the release of this dark mode earlier in July and had even introduced a temporary version of it for Halloween in the previous year. The new permanent dark mode feature can be enabled from the quick settings toggle and as of now, it only works with the default blue theme. It appears to be a lot more sophisticated than the one designed for Halloween having more of a grey appearance rather than black.
As explained by Microsoft, “One of the most crucial principles we had when designing Dark Mode was to minimize the amount of eye strain that people felt. Many email clients on the web today advertise a dark mode, but we learned from interviews with others and our own usage that having the reading pane be on-light while the rest of the interface was left on-dark often made the experience worse than if the full screen were left on-light.”
For some time now, the dark mode for Outlook.com has been one of the most highly requested features for the web mail service of Microsoft and the software giant stated that it made some adjustments to the Halloween prototype in order to redesign the colours and code a number of times before it would finally release it. furthermore, the company incorporated a toggle within the body of emails which allows users to disable the dark mode when they are finding it hard to read a particular message.
At the moment, Microsoft has not yet applied the new dark mode as a theme, and to add to that, the company imagines “that there would be a dark experience for all available themes in the future.” Outlook.com Microsoft’s web mail service has over 400 million active users and the company of recent threw in a new design and some features for the calendar and contacts sections. The new design was also released in its beta phase the same day the dark mode was released.
