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Comment by dmurray | Hacker News Reader

One of the attractions of Chrome when it first came out was that it had less chrome, that most of the precious screen real estate could be devoted to showing the content of the web page, or at least to ads. I'd guess IE9 was a reaction to that.

When we only had 640 vertical pixels, it was a huge change not to have 150 of them taken up with rows of icons and bookmarks by default. Now we have the space to get those controls back, but we're used to not having them.

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I had roughly the same amount of rows of pixels on my desktop computer in 2008 as I have now (1280x1024 to 1920x1080). I had even more for a few years prior to that, when I had a CRT monitor that I'd gotten for free (1600x1200).

It's AFAIK pretty much only with 4k monitors that we have caught up with CRTs resolution-wise, and not a lot of people have either of those. w3schools lists a bunch of resoltion statistics. In 2008, the most common resolution was 1024x768. 1366x768 in 2018. Same vertical resolution. Since I thought those statistics may account for phone users as well, I looked further. Globalstats lists 1366x768 as the most common desktop resolution in 2019. Desktop in this case probably accounts for laptops as well, as I believe there is no way to tell the two apart with User-Agent.

https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

http://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/wo...

I also remember Firefox 2 being configurable enough that you could easily get less chrome than Chrome. The big win for me was process-per-tab.

1366x768 has been the default resolution for cheap laptops for over a decade now. It's only very slowly being replaced with 1920x1080, but even when this transition is complete, effective information density is unlikely to change much. There are only so many pixels you can squeeze onto a 13" screen before most users need to scale up the UI.

For someone with bad eyesight like me, the sweet spot for a 13" laptop would be 4K at somewhere between 250% and 300% scaling. That would give me just about the same effective information density as good ol' 1366x768. I guess there's a reason why this awkward resolution still refuses to die.

Seeing the size of the chrome on the old IE versions, particularly version 3 where they upgraded to the large buttons with help text, made me think about how nice it was to have the relatively plain content on the web at that time. The information density was high enough that the small space for the actual document was still enough for a decent experience. Even with those low screen resolutions, the amount of content on the screen was probably similar to that of many websites today with all their bloat.

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