> Having a widescreen monitor is irrelevant to me unless I fullscreen my browser (which I don't and I assume most don't).
Are you kidding? I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.
Using the drag-and-drop feature that splits the screen between two GUIs already marks the office power user, a third windows on a single screen brings us into the territory of the hardcore nerds running tiling window managers.
> I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.
99% of the folks I interact with usually just use whatever size the browser opens in initially, then maybe resize it if they're reading for a while, or need to see more info. If half a pic shows up, they might try to fumble to grab a handle to resize to see more of the pic; sometimes it works, sometimes they end up giving up.
Going 'full screen' may be different than just 'as wide and tall as the monitor', because 'full screen' mode gets rid of the window chrome, which causes confusion.
The only folks I know who consistently use browsers 'full screen' are on mobile devices where that's generally the only option.
Do you interact with a lot of people using macs? I find that Mac users don’t maximize their windows. They leave them cluttered everywhere; all the people I know on Windows maximize their windows.
Do you have a tiny monitor? I find that people with small mointors maximize their windows because they have to.
I have a 27" widescreen. The idea of maximizing a browser window is absurdity. My monitor can comfortably show three websites side by side. The amount of wasted white space on a full screen website would approach 90%.
Here's this very post fullscreened (without a taskbar). What a wild waste of space and the content is clearly not designed to be viewed like this, with the UX being located at the top left lol.
Because that is clearly not the norm for webpages? You're picking deliberate low-tech html pages. HN and memeorandum are not representative of the internet at large.
Honestly, man I don't care for this conversation. You do you bae. I was merely offering an observation of what I've seen from people and you're not even talking about that.
FWIW, I run my browser full screen. I run most apps full screen. By full screen, I don't mean that weird macos thing where it removes everything and locks you into a single app in a single workspace but the more standard one where the window is just expanded to fill the screen space.
The only time I run an app without fullscreen-ing it is if I don't have to do much in it or it doesn't have enough content to use up all the space anyways. Like system settings. Otherwise, I am using the app -> I am focusing on it -> I want it to take all the space it wants and show me everything going on inside it. My browser and my text editor are apps where I spend 99% of my time so they are always full screen.
It used to be possible to run web pages and applications not full screen. But moderne UIs are so wasteful of space, with massive icons, it has become almost impossible.
Are you kidding? I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.
Using the drag-and-drop feature that splits the screen between two GUIs already marks the office power user, a third windows on a single screen brings us into the territory of the hardcore nerds running tiling window managers.