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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why people complain about line length when that really means you should just resize the window to your preference.

On the other hand, pages that stay in a narrow column in the middle when I widen the window really infuriate me, because I explicitly asked for wider columns and am not getting it.

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Who does that? I think most people browse the web with many tabs open at once, and switch between them constantly. I don't think it should be on the user to resize their browser viewport every time they switch tabs to maintain a comfortable measure. That's the website's responsibility.

On Windows you can do it with a single keybinding. Windows key + left or right arrow.

every time they switch tabs

The whole idea is that when you have the window at a comfortable width, the content in all your other tabs should also be.

... no? You can switch between YouTube, magazines and wikipeida in a browser. Most written content sites enforce max widths for their content, so you can switch to them in a maximised window in which you were watching youtube without having to resize your window. Wikipedia is an outlier in that, and for no good reason.

Me. I do that.

I disagree. I want to be able to set the width to whatever I want; it is the user's job to set it to what they want. The website's responsibility is to not needlessly override the user's settings. If you want many tabs at once and switching, possibly with different widths, I think the best solution to that is split-screen (implemented in the browser), which solves many other problems too, actually.

I thought about resizing the window, but then most websites slap you with a hamburger menu and neuter the interface.

The web is such a shit place in terms of design. This is probably why I like reading books and magazines in print. At least the lay out is done by a professional who doesn't have a title "UX/UI" designer and doesn't have a Behance/Dribble portfolio. These people are professionals and they conduct themselves as such.

> I don't understand why people complain about line length when that really means you should just resize the window to your preference.

Different people have different workflows. Many people I know only have 1 browser window open, always maximized, with a ton of tabs open in it. They definitely won't go about resizing the window for no good reason. I don't think any mainstream website relies on the user resizing the browser window for, what I think are, good reasons.

My experience is that most people who were raised on Windows will just full-screen everything. Long-time Mac users are more likely to use sized-to-fit windows.

Why do you think is that? Genuinely curious. There's nothing in Windows that prominently wants you to have everything maximized (ignoring the semi-new tablet mode; windowing behavior stems from a time long before that).

macOS, on the other hand, explicitly advertised having an "immersive" fullscreen mode (with a dedicated button in the past).

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