Hacker News Reader

Comment by khedoros | Hacker News Reader

What's uncomfortable about browsing with a full-size window? I usually find it slightly more painful not to have the browser maximized.

View on HN

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.

Fair enough. I'm accustomed to reading 200 character lines, so I guess I don't notice as much. Making the window narrower to force the lines to wrap at 40 or 60 chars feels constricting/claustrophobic to me, and I'm not a big fan of the sites that display text in a thin column, about 1/3 the width of the screen.

There were a few years that I configured my work machine to have dual monitors in portrait mode. That helped my feeling of constriction, while giving shorter lines of text. As a bonus, it matched pretty closely to the 1280 width (at 1200 pixels), and often allowed more of the text to be shown at once.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com