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Comment by klinch | Hacker News Reader

No offence, but "please don't do X" where X is favoured by the big majority of users AND has a broad scientific base sounds a bit... entitled?

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It has nothing to do with entitlement. If you choose an arbitrary width based on usability studies, you may make a large percentage of users happy, but if you let users set the width by resizing their browser, you make 100% of users happy. Why not choose the latter?

My windows stay maximized and I’m not about to faff about, resizing them. When I come across an Ultra Panavision website I usually just open the dev tools with a single F-key to squish it.

I’m not going to resize my browser each time I follow a link or switch between tabs.

Nonsense. People almost always use browsers maximized. And many people have 2.5k or 4k screens. Even on 1080p screens full width text is unreadable.

I seriously doubt there are any people who resize their browser window every time they switch tabs.

Right, there is a reason newspapers long ago realized multiple columns is better than full-width text. Imagine reading New York Times if it had only one full-width column. People would stop subscribing to it.

it what's also nonsense is, to firmly associate browser window width with tab content width. The user can control these independently. Maybe it should be made easier to do so, or more comfortable. At some point though we should take a step back and ask ourselves how we can solve the problem without dumbing down the interface so much, that capable users suffer.

I must not be a people -- I don't have my browser maximized. I like to be able to see the browser window, Emacs, and a terminal all at once.

If the user needs to set their own width by resizing the window they can also set the width by right-clicking -> inspect element -> disabling the CSS style on the div that gives it a max width. Which is only a couple more clicks than resizing the window and affects a lot less people.

Often not so easy to do with nowadays bloated designs and tons of patronizing frontend devs making websites. You might have to remove 10 styles for all the bloat containers they used to contain fancy text. Better to not prescribe any preference and enable the user via standard browser tooling, which definitely would spring up, if users showed significant interest in such.

You won't make 100% of the users happy. In fact if argue you would make the majority of the users unhappy. I don't want to have to realize my browser for every web site. Is rather have a website that is fairly easy to read without me doing anything. I think most people would want that.

> but if you let users set the width by resizing their browser, you make 100% of users happy

It's very ignorant to believe 100% of users are happy with having to resize their browsers just to get a pleasant rendering of the site.

Resizing browser is cumbersome and will definitely NOT make me happy. Especially since I have tiled desktop but even without it.

If you really want to please everybody here, introduce an option that is remembered in a cookie (reading preference, trivial to implement). There is no one size fit all here.

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