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Comment by bloak | Hacker News Reader

I prefer 4:3. I was brought up on it and it just seems right. I think a lot of the old films I watch are 4:3 anyway, unless they're 2.39:1, in which case 16:9 is hardly ideal either.

What I find really hilarious is how they sell laptops with a 16:9 screen with an OS that confiscates a wide strip at the bottom of the screen, a browser that confiscates a wide strip at the top of the screen, and then the web sites add their own massive strip of menus and crap at the top of the screen, and some cookie notice that you can't possibly agree to removes another generous strip from the bottom, so that the remaining aspect ratio for the actual content is about 9:1 and it's like peering through somebody's letterbox.

"Hullo, Mrs Jones, are you all right in there?"

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It's mad that our screens had this fundamental widescreen shift and none of the user interface people changed anything.

I've been moving my taskbar to the side of the screen for years - it just makes so much more sense on a screen with almost twice the width as height.

> none of the user interface people changed anything.

Like a stopped clock ubuntu got this one right.

As for aspect ratios, just pick a universal one please, I don't care which I just don't want to listen to my uncle complain about the black bars at the top/bottom when he's watching a movie.

That’s the whole point of tree style tabs and yet browsers refused to support that natively...

I've been doing the same thing, it's all on the left.

I don't really know the solution for taskbars and the like.

There's sidebars, taskbars, auto-hiding and popups.

I've seen them all done poorly.

I think the worst of all are microsoft products - somehow the online interface for microsoft word is completely different from teams, but they are both uniformly awful.

Strangely I know clearly the ones I hate, but it's hard to recall the ones that work well because they're invisible.

So many websites (hacker news included) just leave so much white space either side while also making you scroll. Look at the state of reddits "new" design, it uses 25% of the width of a modern screen, its absurd. Almost everyone has 16:9/16:10 nowadays you would think they might like to utilise it better.

How would you qualify "better"? For me longer lines to read does not mean better but worse.

Absolutely agree, text has a very real limit to its width before it is hard to read.

Taking reddit as an example they stack the title and the image above each other then all the links for comments, share, save ... below that. So the entire design is vertical for each post. More than that the trending is at the top and the selector for whether you want hot/new all above it. Even on 1440p I reckon about 40% of the top of my screen goes to tab/url/boomarks and the headers of the page, none of it I care about the moment I want to read that site.

Reddit puts a bit of secondary stuff on the right but nothing on the left of the content at all. The content is literally 25% of the width of the screen, its mostly grey space and yet they have this entirely vertical design for every post and all their controls are at the top. It isn't the only possible way to do this and its terrible for wide screens of any type. The old design utilises widescreens a heck of a lot better which is I presume why it is quite popular.

Yep, I have all of my browser tabs on the side and auto hide my taskbar

Hilarious but brutally honest description of state of laptop aspect ratios! Even Thinkpad brand has fallen to the meme of 16:9 screens... I remember all the hopes we had for a 16:10 or 3:2 Thinkpad retro :(

Check out this year's ThinkPad line-up for a surprise.

It's only a problem if you can't move the taskbar to the left/right and hide the browser titlebar.

No, it is a problem that you have to.

It is a design failure that the interface is not build to accomodate the typical screen that the interface is sold with.

This is like selling right handed scissors at a convention for left handed people or color coding a guide for colorblind people

I think you are exaggerating here, and I don't see the design failure as long as you have a choice how to configure your environment.

To take your comparison, color blind people can enable accessibility options, but it's not enabled by default for everybody.

The only OS that actively disallows this is macOS... I couldn't figure out how to move menu bar on that test machine...

Just for my understanding, what would your ideal interface be?

His point is that if 90% of the users were color blind, the accessibility options would be enabled by default. So, in accordance, if 99% of people use a wide screen, task bars and window decorations should be to the side, not top or bottom, by default.

It goes well beyond that. I can't make the bookmarks or tabs on the browser go down the side even though that would save a bunch of space vertically. Windows/Ubuntu/Mac OS all use the titlebar at the top of the window and waste vertical space even though horizontal is more in abundance and has been for at least 15 years. When you step back and look at the interface its all vertical aligned, everything is top to bottom and yet vertical space is the most precious and least wasteable, why waste 50 pixels on a titlebar and tab bar? The fact fullscreen exists for some apps says it all about the OS waste of that space.

There are a few programs that do this well. NLEs for video usually use horizontal space for the timeline and they get much better horizontal use than just about anything else I use. Photo editing software often puts toolbars on the side but even though inkscape does do this it still has a toolbar even with the tools and properties either side. But websites are mostly vertical and waste most of the space a lot of the time as are browsers. The OS wastes a bunch of vertical space where horizontal is available and the taskbar/app bar is about half of the problem.

You can search a bit and find that you can hide/move title, menu and tab bars.

menu bar:

- Ubuntu - use KDE or other WM - you have menu bar on the right if you want (or removed entirely)

- Windows - right click and configure as you wish.

- Mac OS - complain to Apple... I couldn't figure it out either... probably was holding it wrong as per Steve Jobs...

title bar:

- firefox / chrome have option to hide it entirely.

tab bar:

- firefox: first search, there are others: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...

As for other programs... it's up to them.

And let's not forget the entire "mobile first" hullabaloo which organizes every site in narrow columns, so regardless what one thinks about text line length you will still have huge spaces left and right and buttons popping over what you're trying to read.

>And let's not forget the entire "mobile first"

Where half of the screen is covered with ads, banners, and irrelevant auto-playing videos that you cannot scroll away from.

Have you tried 3:2? I have this on my surface book 2 and it is fantastic. It replaced 4:3 as my favorite ratio!

This is one of the reasons I detest ribbon interfaces.

it's this that makes me wonder why vertical tabs are not more popular

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