I'm sorry, but zooming is just... dumb... at least for me, sorry. Having a giant text doesn't help the readability - at least for me :( And it's not like changing window size only when visting Wiki is a good solution too - it's nuisance to change window size when you came for a quick 30 second read. At least for me.
Accessibility is individual. I'll be reading Wikipedia articles at 200% now, like I do for virtually all one-column layouts. And this Wikipedia layout has good responsiveness, so no worries.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but it is wrong for me. I have a browser with say 8 tabs open. When I switch between tabs, I don't want to have to keep resizing the browser geometry.
I think if you really want full-width text, you could write a little custom CSS to make it work how you want it. As it stands, I think the new design is a much better default for most people.
Also, zooming and changing browser window size is, while only a keystroke away, isn’t something I want to do just to make a site that should be optimized for reading text more legible. It should just default to that way.
In short, I’m sorry this doesn’t fit your flow. That’s frustrating. But I think this is a better design. Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography seems to support this view. [1] (MB is a lawyer, typographer, and Racket programmer for those not familiar with his work.)
> I think if you really want full-width text, you could write a little custom CSS to make it work how you want it.
How? Seriously, if you have a way to do this that works for pages in general I'll be extremely grateful. I tried using a user stylesheet that said * { max-width: 100% !important } for a while, but that breaks too many non-root elements on all sorts of sites.
Whereas making the page narrow when it doesn't set a max-width seems very easy to do with a custom stylesheet.
I use the Stylus extension for Chrome (also available on Firefox) to write user styles for sites, mostly to improve the legibility of text, but for sites like HN and Reddit that I browse a lot I've customised their look and feel extensively to match my tastes. Creating a custom style for a site just requires you to click the Stylus button in the toolbar, click on the site name at the bottom of the menu to create a new style and open the editor in a new tab and then add your CSS and hit save. You can also search for existing styles for your current website that have been published online.
You can have one style apply to multiple domains, I have a simple one for making text black and setting the font size and line spacing which works on a dozen sites or so. You can even use SCSS or Stylus instead of plain CSS if you want.
> I use the Stylus extension for Chrome (also available on Firefox) to write user styles for sites, mostly to improve the legibility of text, but for sites like HN and Reddit that I browse a lot I've customised their look and feel extensively to match my tastes. Creating a custom style for a site just requires you to click the Stylus button in the toolbar, click on the site name at the bottom of the menu to create a new style and open the editor in a new tab and then add your CSS and hit save.
Yes, I'm talking about that kind of thing. It's trivial for people who want narrow sites to put a max-width on the root element that way. As someone who wants wide sites, how do I do undo all these designers' narrow widths without having to figure out manually what each individual site has done?
I use the dev tools to find the containing element with max-width by using inspect, clicking on the text and then finding which ancestor has the width, and then it's something like
which works in most cases. It's totally a pain to have to do on a new site, but once it's done then you never have to do it again - at least until the website does a redesign lol.
I don't do this personally, so I'm fuzzy on the details. I know of no way to make this work in general (how would you do that?) across sites, but Wikipedia pages follow a consistent format, so that shouldn't be too hard. Furthermore, someone[1] here on HN showed how you can control how the theme works.
My point: if you care that deeply about how Wikipedia in particular is laid out, you likely have the tools to force it to work that way. Meanwhile, the rest of us plebs get a better (from a typographical standpoint, not necessarily a case-by-case basis) default.
Not all uses of Wikipedia are the types of reading supported by works and research in long-form reading. Hell, many, many Wikipedia articles aren't long-form, and paragraph text is a minority of content on some table-heavy articles.
The issue isn't with width but a lack of user preferences, logged in and not. You don't need user accounts, cookies, persistence, or frankly even Javascript to change the content width on an article. The skin designer can set the best practice for a contrived ideal use case as the default, and still let anyone with other use cases expand the content's max-width to fill more space.
EDIT: Looks like they added one — there's now a "Toggle limited content width" button now appearing for me in the bottom-right corner of the wider desktop views.
Mac OS (and some linux desktops) seems to really expect you to manage windows by having them always be full screen and swiping between desktops. Which makes changing browser window geometry sub-optimal.
Even on desktops where it's reasonably easy, it's pretty annoying to have to resize the window when you go to different sites to get them to format properly.
> Mac OS … seems to really expect you to manage windows by having them always be full screen and swiping between desktops. Which makes changing browser window geometry sub-optimal.
That hasn't been my experience at all, in fact for me macOS works better when windows are mostly sized to fit their content. Windows and Windows-like Linux DEs is where I feel pressure to maximize everything.
I agree. Anecdotally, I also see more PCs with maximized windows in the wild, and more Macs with smaller windows. (I don't really see many people using Linux in the wild.)
I'm curious if you're seeing this on desktops? My sample of mac users is very heavily biased towards laptops (and I've only used macos on a laptop) - but I've seen the exact opposite.
Considering how the macOS maximize button works I’d wager this dichotomy is at least partway intentional by Apple, to stop you from falling into the Windows habit of “maximize everything even if it means half your screen is blank”.
It's not necessarily a function of the linux desktop. I use xfce, but it would be entirely easy to work with non-full-screen windows for my browser, emacs, clementine etc. However, I choose not, and use workspaces to spread things out.
