"I turned off Dark Reader and uBlock"
When you get older, not only do parts of your body head south and start to refuse to co-operate with the rest of you, your eyesight goes badly off track. Its all a bit disconcerting.
I have never been a fan of "dark mode", even when the www didn't exist. Sometimes magazines would go weird and print an article in reverse - white on black. Dramatic effect or some such bollocks. When the fount (a specific instantiation of a typeface) was small enough and the print blead too badly in the specific copy you are reading it became very tricky to read.
Nowadays we have pixels small enough to be much better than ye olde skoole CRT scan lines and a LED screen has a refresh rate that, even in my florescent tube lit lair (not really), is rock solid.
I can read the site but it is not as easy as possible for me and let's face it: a book with a well chosen typeface and fount is a fair standard of readability and legibility. Why not replicate that in a web page?
Why on earth is the text occupying only 1/3 of my screen widthways? When have you seen a book or mag with 1/3 margins?
The fount is a sans job but it is small and white on black which is hard for me. At least it is very thin so that the glare from the white text doesn't go too fuzzy.
Have a look at Wikipedia. There's a good reason for their design choices - they have to worry about everyone and not just their mates.
> When have you seen a book or mag with 1/3 margins?
Magazines almost always have their text in thin columns, because long lines are difficult to follow. Books are also typically 1/3th the width of a typical computer screen for the same reason.
Long lines aren't that difficult to follow. And for those who find it so, they can just resize their browser window. Meanwhile I have to go mess with the dev console on half the sites I visit these days because they insist on having text in a 2-inch wide column. That is a way worse problem.
Columns work if you can see all of the column - screens are wide and short, books/mags are thin and deep.
A physical book has a ratio of exactly the opposite of your laptop. Amazon realised this quite quickly and you will note that their readers have a book shape.
Look at this web site (HN) which is used by some of the most vociferous nerds ever (including you and me) and tell me I am talking bollocks! Note the styles, layout, colours in use.
How far removed from white on black text, 1/3 screen width and teenager bedroom looks are we away from?
> Look at this web site (HN) which is used by some of the most vociferous nerds ever (including you and me) and tell me I am talking bollocks! Note the styles, layout, colours in use.
I use HN in a half window, so the text is roughly the same width as the website here.
A screen is not a piece of paper. Computers adopted white backgrounds with black text, when the technology became available, to imitate the paper and documents that people were most familiar with. But looking at a white screen for prolonged periods of time is like staring directly at a light bulb.
White text on a black background in print is indeed harder to read due to the issue of ink bleeding, but on a computer screen it is so much easier on the eyes.
Too bad Wikipedia made their site less accessible (and less readable) with the recent redesign.
I don't know, to me the text that's spanning the entire width of the monitor is less accessible than a column with more sensible width.