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Comment by jayess | Hacker News Reader

My eyes must be getting old, but black-background web sites are getting harder to read.

I noticed a bit of "fuzz" that seemed out of place as well.

Turns out that the body tag has:

  -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;

This greatly reduces the contrast on a dark background in my opinion.

Here's a screenshot to show off the difference with the top being the current site, and the bottom being what it looks like without that CSS:

https://i.imgur.com/3UOIOWL.png

I haven't been able to read black background text for a long time. I wanted to read this article, but I couldd only read the first paragraph or so before I had to close the page.

When I was much younger than today, I was using black back terminals (the physical kind) all the time so at least at some point point I didn't have problems with it.

Part of what I prefer about Firefox over Chrome is the "Reader View" feature, it strips pages of JS and CSS styling and gives you the raw article so you can view the content as you so desire, including darker or lighter backgrounds, larger font or smaller font.

See:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...

Note: I use Chrome at work, mostly to test but my main browser is Firefox which seems to still feel natural to me. I was a day 1 early adopter to Chrome but couldn't get used to their browser.

I know about that, and I use it whenever possible. However, some sites (for example Mastodon) is a dynamic web application.

There is a plugin I used to use, called "care for my eyes" that allowed me to change the colours. However, its main purpose is to swap colours for people who prefer black background (a bit strange to me, but I accept their opinion) but it used to have an option to do the opposite. Unfortunately, that option is now gone so I am again unable to use sites with black background.

Try Stylish? It's pretty decent, and if you know any CSS worst case if a site you're on has no style, you can set one for that site, I think some of the styles are generic towards all sites too to try to do the best to darken them or lighten them up.

Send your clicks/views to a different site with a good write-up: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/moon-ori...

https://outline.com/https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-made...

Frequently works, though not here.

Data point, thank you. It's getting harder for me as well, but not so much that I noticed until you pointed it out. I have always preferred light-on-dark text on any kind of screen, and havde never quite understood why it wasn't the standard way to do things. But now I see.

I've always preferred light on dark and I'm nearing 40. I still prefer it by far, but one thing I've noticed is that the contrast ratios are so good in modern displays, that it can be harsh on the eyes. If you look back at the old days of green text CRTs, the black was never "black" it was more of a deep gray, almost black matte color.

I find that websites that use white or off-white on a dark shade of gray or light grey text on black look the best.

I don't think 255,255,255 on 0,0,0 is a good idea even though I prefer light on dark.

Example: http://i.imgur.com/CQ9WZAp.png

Well, I'm sort of nearing sixty, and believe me, it does make a difference. Driving at night, especially in heavily lighted and trafficked areas, just isn't as laid back as it used to be. Nor, as noted, is reading light on dark.

Your observations on 255/000 are obviously correct. In fact, I have always preferred light and dark greys to pure white and black in whatever design work I have done.

Just out of curiosity, how do you feel with white on blue? Personally it's my favorite (I even have a small snippet to change any website I'm reading to white-on-blue)

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