Understood, I upvoted your message. The different preferences between sites -- and tabs -- is the biggest nuisance for me too, but not too big a nuisance.

You don't have resize commands bound to the keyboard? Windows ships with these, Mac and Linux have free programs that do them well.

I have the opposite, or at least on my Macbook I have everything full screen. Every program I run I use full screen, and therefore has its own virtual desktop. It gives me a lot more screen real estate without the menu bar on the top and the dock on the bottom.

Linux, with a tiling window manager. :-) You could say that it favors strongly both cases: running windows full-screen and also running a 70% window with say two 15% windows.

Windows 10, which I use in work, has this annoying habit that if I maximize browser for a webapp that requires (benefits from) more screen estate, it doesn't always restore to the earlier size correctly. But it's something I can live with.

I run low-distraction windows or even just show the desktop next to my half-a-screen browser.

I have found it generally very uncomfortable because a vast majority of content on the web doesn't scale well vertically. You keep a wide window, you get way too long paragraphs that are hard to read as your eyes jump between the lines and whatnot. I've seen a couple excellent designs that do new columns as content comes, and there's only vertical scrolling. The columns are like 40-60 chars in width, as they should be. It's nice, accommodates the today's wide screens super well. But a majority of sites, HN included, are way wide for content if I browsed them in a 1920x1080 viewport.

HN specifically, if I have serious reading to do in the comment section, I might narrow my browser down to 600px for even better readibility.