This. I hate dark mode because it’s difficult to read for me (myopia due to age) - the glowing letters on dark background get much blurrier for some reason.

Most people who like dark mode use it so they can be in a dimly lit room and not have the display blast their eyes with light but I’ve found that under low ambient light my vision is far blurrier - a well lit room complemented by light mode (ie natural, default) display is the easiest to read.

Hear, hear.

Back when I attempted to be an edgy college guy, I carried my Gentoo with green foreground on a black background. EVERYWHERE. My pcmanfm (yes, I was one of those) looked glorious in true matrix style (and I did have a matrix screensaver). I did it because it was "cool", not because I felt that dark mode was better.

Then when I changed to MacOS, since there wasn't native dark mode, I don't think I ever _thought_ of even changing it. Things just looked great and I had no complaints.

And, as I've aged, dark mode started to actually hurt my eyes.

There's a special kind of dark mode which I can never put my finger on and literally makes my head hurt. I can feel my light adjusting itself to the change and the blurriness settling in. Every letter seems to transfer some of its weight onto neighboring letters, even those in a previous paragraph with quite a large vertical gap! I don't see the letters overlap but it's like my mind is telling me that they ARE overlapping. It's bizarre but it's the best description I can give: my brain is convinced they overlap, even though my eyes disagree.

I can never focus on those websites and have to quit immediately. Usually pitch black is bad, but I've seen some websites make it work. I once read it has to do with astigmatism and ever since then I've paroted that, but I have friends with astigmatism who scoff at my white/light mode.

Examples (most of them from random googling):

- This is terrible. The green makes my head hurt and it's very hard to focus on it. https://anilkody.framer.website/?ref=darkmodedesign

- This is ok. https://www.danielsantos.co/

- Our company's website is fine https://www.cron.studio/

- Also ok https://superset.sh/

- Unbearable: https://www.omnius.so/web-development

I'm a guy who loves to have the maximum brightness, and incredibly bright lights. I'm not kidding: if I work against a black wall I'll go crazy. Back at my parent's place I pointed 4 different strong ceiling lights at the place where I used to have the computer to make sure it was LIT.

It sort of sucks because there's an increasing amount of dark-mode only websites and I've had to occasionally apply custom styles to them just to browse...