I wouldn't. I like the page wide. I like that by not setting a max-width, I can have my browser at whatever width works for me. This is how the web was supposed to work.

Agreed... well-circulated research demonstrates maximum comfortable line widths for various mediums.

It's frustrating when someone decides "damn the system" in the name of a proto pre-design-standards aesthetic instead of just making sure standard zooms leave their content at 12-14 words per line.

On the other side, You can have your own stylesheet, without even a single !important ;)

Safari's Reader View for the rescue ;)

Which kind of defeats the purpose of the original article.

I think it does the opposite, The author wanted to send a structured document without presentation, with your tool of liking (I used Firefox's reader view) you can read comfortably without compromising the content of the article or it's features.

edit: I could have used curl, an html processor and a pager like less or more

I'm pretty sure the author is against using special tools to read static text. That's his whole point, that people don't need browsers/readers or any fancy app to read static text!

You have one. It's called "the size of the browser window". If you don't want a site to be the size of your monitor, don't use a full screen window.

This is how I use the browser - 1920px is way too wide for reading, and I like my browser windows in portrait mode for more vertical space anyway. Unfortunately, yet another idiotic "feature" of javascript (and CSS media queries) allow the webpage access to the actual monitor resolution. Some particularly idiotic sites use this, causing utterly unreadable pages (i.e. all "sidebar" and margin) if you have your your window at something like 900px wide instead of the 1920px they are detecting.

This is mostly the websites fault, of course. It's the same forced-layout mentality that has always caused problems on the web.

as a remedy I have one of my monitors rotated 90° into portrait orientation. I can just drag the offending tab across and have a screen width of 1200px. There are a (very) few sites though that seem to cache the original screen width and need a hard refresh.

Why not resize the window to your preferred width? max-width would just waste most of the screen with whitespace, while a smaller window will let you put it where you want and work with other things in the rest of the space.

I have a pair of 27" monitors and almost never maximise windows - the exception is when working with very large images that need the full resolution.

I almost always maximize windows unless I'm doing something where I need to mentally integrate multiple applications. I'm certainly not going to fuck around with popping tabs out into individual windows and resizing them when casually consuming content. Either it's legible or I move on.

I dislike max-widths. It wastes screen real-estate.

So, books, magazines, and virtually every form of print should have margins, but the web should have the text go right up to the edge of the browser?

I disagree that a sensible max-width is wasted screen real-estate. Even after resizing my browser I'd prefer my content to have a little bit of space to breathe.

I just realized that the comment section of hackernews uses ~80% of the window width, with hardly any padding for top level comments.

100% of the window is wasted if the lines are too long to read.