white background

There are quite a lot of different opinions regarding the background colour of web sites (and text):

a) the text and background should have a high contrast (white background, black text);

b) the intensity of the colour "white" on a screen differs from that of paper (it's much higher), so grey backgrounds look better;

c) sticking to the slogan "Internet - data overflow, information underflow" red text on a red background looks best.

And you can have them all :-) I guess your browser has several features to define the screen colours and the use of background images, at least CAB and Netscape do.