Microsoft has been rapidly building up the Bing website over the past few months, as Bing Chat adds new features and AI responses appear in regular web searches. However, the Bing site was still missing an option for a dark mode, making it stand out (in a bad way) against all the desktop apps and sites that now have that feature. Thankfully, Microsoft is finally fixing that.
Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s Head of Engineering and Product for Bing, confirmed on Twitter X that a dark mode option is now rolling out for the Bing site — including the Bing Chat interface. The post explains, “We are starting to roll out desktop dark mode for Bing over the next few days. We heard the requests for dark mode and are excited for everyone to experience this feature in Bing Search and Chat.”
The dark mode will be accessible from the hamburger menu at the top-right of the Bing site, under the ‘Appearance’ menu. You’ll be able to choose from a light mode, dark mode, or following your system/browser’s current design. It hasn’t rolled out to us yet, but the provided screenshots are about what you’d expect — the dark background with light text can be easier on the eyes at night or in dark environments. Bing Chat in the sidebar of Microsoft Edge already matched the browser theme, but this is the first time the full desktop site has offered light and dark modes.
The new feature comes after Microsoft started opening up Bing Chat to other browsers, instead of restricting it to Microsoft Edge. However, Bing Chat in other browsers has a more restrictive limit on turns in each session, and prompts can only be 2,000 characters or less.
Microsoft also just added image inputs to Microsoft Bing, becoming the first public implementation of image processing in GPT-4. Images can be used as context for questions, such as describing the images, or used in the context of other information provided as text or links.
It’s great to see the Bing site become more usable, but it would be better if the restrictions on Bing Chat in third-party browsers would go away entirely — there’s no reason for them other than to drive up usage of Microsoft Edge.
Source: Jordi Ribas (Twitter/X)
