Hacker News Reader

Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Having a widescreen monitor is irrelevant to me unless I fullscreen my browser (which I don't and I assume most don't). My (multiple) browser windows on my very big wide screen are all roughly in 4:3 ~square shape and top tabs make a lot more sense.

And unless you have a browser full of tabs, vertical tab lists usually have massive amounts of purely wasted white space and are generally much less space efficient overall.

Every once in a while I wouldn't mind for a specific window to have vertical tabs with nested tabs, as a psuedo live-bookmark organization system for a current project. But it's not a daily driver for me.

View on HN

> Having a widescreen monitor is irrelevant to me unless I fullscreen my browser (which I don't and I assume most don't).

Are you kidding? I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.

Using the drag-and-drop feature that splits the screen between two GUIs already marks the office power user, a third windows on a single screen brings us into the territory of the hardcore nerds running tiling window managers.

> I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.

99% of the folks I interact with usually just use whatever size the browser opens in initially, then maybe resize it if they're reading for a while, or need to see more info. If half a pic shows up, they might try to fumble to grab a handle to resize to see more of the pic; sometimes it works, sometimes they end up giving up.

Going 'full screen' may be different than just 'as wide and tall as the monitor', because 'full screen' mode gets rid of the window chrome, which causes confusion.

The only folks I know who consistently use browsers 'full screen' are on mobile devices where that's generally the only option.

Do you interact with a lot of people using macs? I find that Mac users don’t maximize their windows. They leave them cluttered everywhere; all the people I know on Windows maximize their windows.

Do you have a tiny monitor? I find that people with small mointors maximize their windows because they have to.

I have a 27" widescreen. The idea of maximizing a browser window is absurdity. My monitor can comfortably show three websites side by side. The amount of wasted white space on a full screen website would approach 90%.

Here's this very post fullscreened (without a taskbar). What a wild waste of space and the content is clearly not designed to be viewed like this, with the UX being located at the top left lol.

https://i.imgur.com/NPxks8b.png

No I have the same size monitor. I don’t think HN is the best website to choose to make your point though.

Ok here's another one, a news site. https://i.imgur.com/4s6Jzvn.png

What does having 60% of my screen be purple do for me? Why would you choose that?

Because that is clearly not the norm for webpages? You're picking deliberate low-tech html pages. HN and memeorandum are not representative of the internet at large.

Honestly, man I don't care for this conversation. You do you bae. I was merely offering an observation of what I've seen from people and you're not even talking about that.

> I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.

I've never had my browser in fullscreen unless it's media content.

I too prefer tabs at top than to the side, as I have four screens, 2x32' and 2x27' -- having the tabs at the top of my top screen feels more natural.

> I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.

Do you mean maximized? I might agree if you do. I almost never see browsers full screen except when playing videos.

FWIW, I run my browser full screen. I run most apps full screen. By full screen, I don't mean that weird macos thing where it removes everything and locks you into a single app in a single workspace but the more standard one where the window is just expanded to fill the screen space.

The only time I run an app without fullscreen-ing it is if I don't have to do much in it or it doesn't have enough content to use up all the space anyways. Like system settings. Otherwise, I am using the app -> I am focusing on it -> I want it to take all the space it wants and show me everything going on inside it. My browser and my text editor are apps where I spend 99% of my time so they are always full screen.

> I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.

I have no idea what the statistics are, but I certainly never run the browser fullscreen and I rarely see others do so.

It used to be possible to run web pages and applications not full screen. But moderne UIs are so wasteful of space, with massive icons, it has become almost impossible.

The only things I run full-screen on a big monitor are drawing programs and development tools.

People don't maximize their windows? I have a 16:9 4k monitor and I maximize everything (browser, IDE, image editor, terminal, mail client) except for the rare occasion when I need something viewed side by side (editor+browser, terminal+browser, 2 file browsers, etc.).

Is the web not a terrible experience in 16:9? My main browser window is closer to 1:1, and even then I have tabs on the left.

Most websites handle it just fine, for the advanced interface of Mastodon the screen could be even wider! For the rare website that doesn't handle 16:9 well I have this bookmarklet:

javascript:var%20b=document.documentElement;b.style.width='900px';b.style.marginLeft='auto';b.style.marginRight='auto';void(0)

One of my monitors is 9:16 - I've rotated it 90°. It's terrific for reading PDF documents, web pages, a terminal, and the IDE.

The only thing it's not really good for is the email client, video, and pictures. For those I have another monitor in the standard landscape configuration.

I used to have a similar setup, but I replaced the dual head setup (24" 9:16 and 30" 16:9) with one ultrawide one.

I suppose just as wide 16:9 display would have been even nicer, but it's fine. There are some benefits in window placement in having just a single screen, even if window managers could work better for this use (e.g. have a "second screen" region where there are separate workspaces).

I run everything maximized on my 32:9 and it's fine to me.

(I've never had overlapping windows in my life -- I find seeing more than one thing super distracting and it annoys me that this seems to be the default on Macs)

It's not.

While the majority probably does, I don’t maximize anything that doesn’t have subpanels by default (like IDEs). In particular, I generally size application windows such that their main text content (if any) takes up a suitable middle column on the screen. That also means that I often have application windows with fixed-sized side panels not fill the whole width of the screen. My browser windows are by default something between 5:4 and 4:3-sized. Even with vertical tabs, the added width wouldn’t be enough to make them full-width.

> And unless you have a browser full of tabs, vertical tab lists usually have massive amounts of purely wasted white space and are generally much less space efficient overall.

The Firefox and Edge implementations have a collapsible panel for the vertical tabs. I agree if they didn't, it would be worse than horizontal tabs.

However, my pet peeve is that it's now impossible to disable tabs altogether, say when using a tiling WM that implements tabbing itself, controllable with the usual shortcuts. Firefox has an extension that always moves tabs to a separate window, but it's janky.

> my pet peeve is that it's now impossible to disable tabs altogether

Yeah, being able to do that would be really nice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com