the main index page wraps nicely to multiple columns when you're on a larger screen.
The latter results in a sort of 'tweetlike' appearance for a lot of G+ posts as they are quite short, the former makes it more 'newspaper' style and introduces the question of how you move from the bottom left to the top right. If you do it with the same posting it makes scrolling challenging, if you do it with multiple postings it makes the user scroll up and down to see the top and bottom.
Then again, there is a really useful layout that folks have been using forever where you put summaries on the left and content expands in boxes on the right. But then it looks just like gmail or something, except that is exactly what it is "group email". Gooogle plus seems confused about what it is, is it twitter ? is it facebook? is it usenet? is it email? Fix its multiple personality disorder and the design will fall out of that naturally.
On the main stream, you have multiple columns of data. On a single post, what should be to either side?
Probably nothing.
I would rather have to scroll down on an article that I can actually read, rather than fit the article on my screen but be unable to read it well.
Wide text only really works for very short text of a few lines. Long text comments on HN tend to suck pretty badly with wide browser windows.
1. Single-pane designs. Multiple columns, especially online, for main content text, is too hard to follow. In a cards-type presentation (e.g., G+) a 2-column display somewhat works, but 3 columns to me simply becomes noise. I think a multi-column (newspaper-like) display might work if you had explicit height alignments, see a site like http://freshnews.org, very old-school, but which essentially has a 3-column grid, and compare with, say, the NYTimes desktop layout. Note that new column heights aren't simply random, but tend to be lined up across the page, or at least a section of it.
2. A flexible main-body text width, but maximising at about 35-45 em. Look up "Edward Morbius's motherfucking web page" on CodePen.io for my interpretation of a popular meme, and pretty much how I style my own content. It's a very minimal ruleset. Pocket and Readability are good models.
3. A paginated, two-page-up mode, for desktop / widescreen mode. See many eBook readers or the Internet Archive's Bookreader in 2-up mode. This gives focus on a single page at a time, but the ability to reference across two pages. I use a tablet in portrait (1-up) mode a lot, and prefer being able to reference back and forth across two pages. A fixed pagination also feeds my spatial memory for where something was on a page. Pocket has a paginated mode, but it's dynamic, changing to wherever you've scrolled a page. I dislike that.
4. Except for the very narrowest display, at least a minimum margin on sides. I'll usually set 1-2em for even a small-factor mobile device, and prefer 4-5em for most widths. As text body reaches 45em, center the main body. Text that runs flush to the screen edge, or is sharply asymmetric on the page, is quite annoying.
5. Use those margins. I've written a sidenote style which puts annotations in the margin, with a dynamic repositioning for narrower widths (or rather the inverse, using Mobile First design). I also push illustrations / images into the right margin to allow text to wrap, but still leave a comfortable width, around inline images.
My problem with a "summaries on the side" display (sidebar) is that the summaries are so often entirely gratuitous and inappropriate. Single-column is far calmer. I move sidebars to headers and footers (through my own site-specific CSS rewrites), or simply disable them entirely.
True story: I'm completely capable of narrowing my browser window if I want narrower text. The site I'm reading doesn't actually need to do that for me!
Not that it matters, really. Narrowing the field is just good practice for readability.
Edit: if you disagree, what the heck are you doing on a site called "Hacker News?" Comment, don't just vote.
The context of this conversation is how a product should have been done. The devs that make that product want people to use it.
You're suggesting that they ignore part of that user base, based on a claim that people shouldn't browse the internet however is most convenient for them. E.g. by using a computer they already have instead of a tablet they might not. All parts of that reasoning are ridiculous.
That's how I did it back in the 90s and early 2000s. I'm not certain when I was forced to start widescreening my browser, but I think it was roughly around the time I got a widescreen (ironically enough, I got more horizontal space and was forced to waste it immediately).
I'm not bitter …
I know Firefox was terribly slow there (like it is with many script-driven websites), but I never dug into why.
There's 3 separate engines all with different tradeoffs.
Have you used Firefox in the past couple of years?
Even if it were slow (which it isn't), it's not doing surveillance for money. If you really want a Chromium-based browser, you could always use Vivaldi or Opera or take your pick of many others.
Glacially slow.
And the recent buzz about a concurrent engine shows how much slower. When you have 300%+ headroom just by uncoupling your execution strategy from an unnecessary global lock no one else has, you are not "speeding up". You are "catching up."
Benchmarks suggest there isn't much in it....
http://hothardware.com/reviews/web-browser-performance-compa...
Firefox is sluggish on every machine, and consistently feels like the slower paint. I understand the synthetic benchmarks are not so distant, but we don't interact with browsers at the level of Sunspider benchmarks. We interact at the level of full dom renders to screen, first clicks available, scrolling and repainting performance, tab open and close time, and startup time.
Firefox has never been a positive experience for me on those on anything but the very oldest of Linux boxes, and quite frankly I've written off the entire X11/Linux desktop environment as a tire fire with people trapped inside.
Also, note the 12 second time is what the Google+ team clocked as average. Yours may have been faster. Others, were even slower.
1. Allow viewers to download my photos and videos shared on Google+
2. Don't feature my publicly shared Google+ photos as background images on Google products and services
Slider 1 is "on" for yes, slider 2 is "off" for yes. Just rephrase the second statement to a positive from a negative and both sliders will be "agree" to the left and "Disagree" to the right.
Then expand one of the expander arrows in the Notifications section. The first line " Occasional updates about Google+ activity and friend suggestions" isn't a question at all, so I'm not sure if I'm agreeing or not. Most of the other statements start with "Show...", but this one is just a blank statement. No consistency at all. With Posts expanded, the top slider button looks like it will be an 'everything on' or everything off' button, but it isn't. So it seems to not have a relationship to the any of the expandable subcategories below it. The "People" expando/expander has only a single button, so no need to expand it all all, then. And so on.
Google do interaction design like an engineer with an ego.
Oh definitely and it seems they've taken over the wheel [1] and went into rage mode with Material design.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-ho...
Google interaction design is more scam artist than engineer.
It's quite possible there's not that many people working on it now.
You don't need someone with post-doc CS expertise to do mundane, basic coding, and someone that advanced wouldn't want to work on the unpopular, "boring" tasks anyway.
I'm generally in favor of a wider column because then the in-line images are bigger. And in either case, I don't see why the column width shouldn't be adjustable.
Of course, since I stopped using G+ years ago, I have no reason to care....
Perhaps there's a correlation to my preference to G+'s layout, but one of the first things I did when I signed back up for FB was make a userscript to remove all that noise. My FB now looks like http://i.imgur.com/Vd6e6sh.png
I think it looks so much better single-column, personally (though I use the 3-column layout on G+).
I'm not sure why they chose such a small default width for desktop.
The new Wells Fargo site is almost a parody of this. It's like trying to use a website in the crappy Xcode iPhone simulator.
The reason is that the page design assumes its on a mobile phone which its somewhat unique tall portrait orientation. And sure enough, looking at the page on my phone it looks a bit flat but it works well.
So now we are in a place in the web where browser users get the crappy UX experience because someone spent all their time focused on the other community and really didn't bother to make their pages responsive to both.