There's diminishing returns on increasing column width; the human eye starts to get strained if reading columns wider than ~60 characters. If the increased page width is applied to design elements and increasing font size, sure. That's not so bad of an application.

However, the English language's z pattern is inherently vertical, meaning that a page should naturally have space on either side; forcing a window to fullscreen just to have a 33% column of text is asinine, and shows that the designer is a prick for thinking strictly for XP and Windows' maximize button.

You're right about Windows' "Maximize Everything" being weird, it seems more and more like it was a good stopgap for people switching over from DOS and needing all the pixels possible on a tiny screen. OS X's natural flow for page windows may get confused from time-to-time, but it's a much better solution for dealing with vertically-biased windows in a widescreen environment.

> the human eye starts to get strained if reading columns wider than ~60 characters

Weird, I had no problem reading your comment even though HN is formatting it for me at around 180 chars.

It's not necessarily something you notice. It gradually gets a bit more difficult once you start getting past that point. And you won't necessarily think "oh, this is so hard to read" either (at least at large-but-still-reasonable widths). It'll just end up being a factor you weigh (if not consciously) when deciding "okay, I've had enough with reading this" and go on to the next thing.

Hope for the future: Windows 7 introduced a new hotkey that resizes windows to take up either the left or right half of the screen: WIN+LEFTARROW or WIN+RIGHTARROW.

There are also drag cues: drag to the top to maximize, to the left or right to maximize 100% vertically and 50% horizontally on the current screen, or when resizing a window drag to an edge to maximize in that dimension.

Thank you.

I use Multiple Monitors/UltraMon and the support for doing this with the mouse is lost (not sure if multiple monitors or b/c of Ultramon).

I guess I should have know there was a hot key.

There's also a tool called Winsplit Revolution which does the same thing. It's like Divvy on the Mac.

Unfortunately, half the screen (on a typical monitor) is not even wide enough to view a "modern" 1000px+ Web page.

Or you could just move the window to the left or right side and it will do just that, no keys involved.

I'd love to understand why someone would mod down my comment. I believe it's my first time, it's insightful so there was no reason to mod it down is it?

At a guess they don't realise that triggers a size snap and thought you meant simply do it manually.

Oh, thanks, I guess I can see that happening now that you say it! Should have been clearer like gxti did sometime after.

Im sorry if this was a joke and I didn't get it, but Windows 7 does exactly that

You misread the comment; read the first sentence as "[there is] hope for the future", not "[this is my] hope for the future"

The problem is that if you don't maximize everything, you'll wind-up with a series of windows which overlap in a less than useful fashion - menus, scrollbars and headlines get obscured and you need to mouse-around-the-screen to do anything.

There are dual problems here. Window Managers are designed to give a "comforting intuitive interface" rather than an interface which lets you do things quickly. But also, manufacturers pump out wide screens intended for video viewing rather than long screens which are suited for text viewing. This also means a good portion of web pages use fixed-width pages to keep from being stretched to unreadability. But these also keep the text from being read from a narrow screen (sure, they could set a max width with CSS but fixed-width also lets the designer guarantee their design looks exactly as they wish).

My browser windows have been approx 1/2 of my screen width for as long as I can remember, at least on desktop machines.

(terminals and emacs through, more like 1/3)

Even on a 1024x600 netbook?

No, the netbook is usually maximized (ubuntu netbook remix), but back when I had a PowerBook duo, the end of the 030era, I was running windows about 400px wide on a 640 px screen. Screens have gotten bigger, but for desktops, vie generally been at about 1/2 the screen, and laptops at 1/2-2/3 or so. I've gotten into some epic... Discussions of fluid layouts and how just because my browser was reporting lots a pixels, the layout wasn't getting them.