Remember screen savers? If you’re like most people, you haven’t really used one since the early 2000s. However, dig into the settings on your computer and you will find them.
Apple has added a number of new screensavers in recent releases, offering 4K videos of cityscapes and nature. They’re stunning, but I bet most Mac owners don’t realize they’re even there. Microsoft, for its part, doesn’t put much effort into new screensavers; the screensavers available in Windows 11 have been around since Windows Vista, which came out in 2007. The iconic 3D maze and pipe screensavers are certainly gone, but others are still there (including Bubbles, introduced with Vista). And most major Linux distributions also offer a selection of screensavers.
It’s kind of weird that a feature that most people haven’t used regularly in the last twenty years still exists on our computers. After all, our computers no longer have floppy drives or PS/2 ports – there’s no reason for that. So why do screensavers still exist? And now that I think about it, why were they made in the first place?
Screensavers used to solve a specific problem
If Popular science staff writer Andrew Paul recently explained that screensavers were developed because of a now outdated technology: the cathode ray tube (CRT) display. If you used a computer in the 1990s, you remember these monitors, which were much thicker than the LCD screens we all use now. All that extra space behind the screen was necessary because of the way these displays worked: an electron gun fired particles at a phosphorescent screen to make pixels glow. The problem: Leave the same thing on the screen for too long and those pixels would ‘seize’, a phenomenon known as ‘burn-in’.
Remember when you were a kid how the adults would tell you that if you made a funny face for too long it would stick? With CRT displays this actually happened and was permanent. In mild cases it would be annoying until you decided to replace the display; in other cases the display may become unusable. With older TVs, which were also CRTs, this was usually not a problem, as they rarely had the same image on the screen for long periods of time. Computers, however, were different. If the user leaves a document or image open, the same content remains on the screen.
That’s where screensavers came into the picture. These programs are designed to start when your computer has been idle for a certain amount of time, such as ten minutes. They would take up the entire screen and, crucially, ensure that different parts of your screen didn’t show the same thing for very long. Whether it’s the appearance of 3D pipes, toasters flying across the screen or abstract patterns dancing around, screensavers are designed to never be static. They were nice, yes, but they were there to prevent burn-in by ensuring that every part of the screen was regularly overwritten by a different color.
Nowadays they are mostly just for fun
Modern computer monitors don’t really suffer from screen burn for a number of reasons. First, the flat LCD screens we all use now are not vulnerable to permanent screen burn. In some cases, of course, you will see a ghost on your screen, but it usually disappears eventually. The other main reason that screen savers no longer exist is that modern computers can put the screen to sleep after a certain period of time. This makes sense when you think about it: why use energy to display a screensaver when you can turn the screen off?
The answer, of course, is that screensavers are fun. It’s nice to step away from your computer at the office and come back to a lot of high-quality nature images, that green code from The Matrixor a lot of bubbles. This, I think, is why tech giants like Microsoft and Apple haven’t removed the feature from their operating systems. Sure, most people don’t use them, but they don’t take up much space and a few people really like them.
Plus, there are a few useful ways to use screensavers. For example, you can set a clock to appear so you can see what time it is from across the room. Or, if you want your computer to contribute to scientific progress in some small way, you can Folding at home. This citizen science project uses the CPU and GPU of users’ computers to simulate folding proteins for medical research, and can optionally be launched as a screensaver so that it only uses your resources when you don’t.
However, most people don’t use screensavers this way. That’s okay. Screensavers no longer have to be practical; they can just be fun to play with every now and then.
