Not on literally any laptop I've ever seen. I've never seen a screen where the browser _isn't_ filling all space available to them, sometimes even the entire screen (in fullscreen mode on MacOS).
A lot of people still make this mistake one way or another. In about the last year I finally gave up; my tiling window manager used to have the browser at 2/3rds the screen with the remaining 1/3 a terminal, but more and more I've been encountering websites that are very unhappy with that width; not small enough to kick in mobile mode or they detect that I'm on a desktop browser and don't adjust, but not large enough for the design they serve me, creating overlapping regions, or horizontal scrolling, etc. So my browser is full screen a lot more often now. On the one hand I'm annoyed, but on the other, an implication of the article is that you essentially can't test at "all" viewport sizes anymore and it's just so easy to accidentally write a website that is unhappy at exactly pixel widths 892-945 when used with my exact font setup and/or zoom setting that I can't really stay mad at some of these sites. Some of the sites I have trouble with are clearly trying, and are competent in many other ways. You can hardly expect your designers to visit every page on your site and test every single width from 200 to 2000 one pixel at at time, let alone ask them to do it again with a variety of zoom settings.
Heck, I can't even tell you my own website can do that. I've checked it on a phone and in my desktop browser at a couple of sizes, but I can't do it anymore than anyone else can nowadays.
It almost makes me nostalgic for 960px being the defacto standard width for desktop sites.
Never. I cmd+tab between windows. What I _have_ seen is developers have those on different monitors, but even there the browser is always fullscreen.
> And even barring that the taskbar of your OS along with window decorations means that your browser is seldom 100% of the screen
I did mention this ;)
Although I think that sentence would probably be better written "It's safest not to presume [...]", as in, don't make assumptions about screen sizes here.
Go maximize your browser and enter this into your dev tools:
console.log(`${window.innerWidth}x${window.innerHeight}`)
Gnome pushes users to fullscreen programs too, with a quick mouse twitch to get the overview open to switch programs.
But I think what they meant is: it is safest not to presume that desktop or laptop users are filling their entire screen with a browser.
The way they wrote it suggest that the assumption of the negative is safest, while the way I wrote it says it is safest not to make the assumption. This has a general smell of the inverse fallacy, although it isn’t like they are trying to make some bulletproof logical deduction anyway.
Personally, I always use a browser full screen and most everything else is 'windowed'. My browser usually ends up being the "background" of my monitor, only traded out when I'm writing code, in which case my IDE is the "background" (full screen). Everything else except games runs in a smaller window. Dragging and dropping still works, like that. It's just really convenient.
From mostly working with other devs, this is usually what I see. This is how I see MOST people use their desktops. Full screen browser, always. Then we get to this article and this comment section and people are talking like it's a given that MOST people use their browsers in windowed mode. Personally, the only time I can even remember someone doing that is when they snap it to an area and then snap something else beside it.
My suspicion is this is a Windows/Linux vs Mac thing? Everything in Mac defaults to "floating" app windows, instead of defaulting to a single app window, maximized, with sub-panel windows inside the app renderer. So people just kind of mentally map it that way, depending on the OS? But then, that's just a guess!
Obviously, I don't mean to imply that one way is better or worse. I'm just kind of intrigued by how blindsided I - and apparently others - are about this.
Anyway, you're right about the article's hand-waving. It's not as compelling to me, because I've had users file tickets when our "anything past 1060px gets centered on the screen, instead of expanding to fill" method was displayed on a 4K screen. They claimed it was "unusable", even though it was entirely the same, it just didn't expand as much as they would have like (yes, even on a TV; other users were using it just fine). So I don't think anything past 800 is less worth consideration. At the very least, I'd say that number is more like 960 or 1400. The upper end of standard desktop sizes instead of the lower. At 800px width, even default browser font sizes look big. Scaling down to a 10 or 11px font size is fine for complex utilities, but when you're trying to size it for big, finger-sized buttons, 800px gets cramped, fast.
But yeah, the overall advice holds.