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Widescreen laptops are dumb

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21–30 of 173 posts

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#21
post #15

The big problem I have started seeing is web design assuming you always browse using a maximized window. Combine this with a prevalent market of wide screens and most sites won’t look right without at least 1200px. So once you put anything like a toolbar or inspector on this side, you have a problem. Designers of many sites I have to use daily seem to assume I’d never want to see two windows at once, let alone rearra…

Not only that, but many websites tend to have very large left and right margins. One would expect that by reducing the width of the browser window the margins would be adjusted but instead the website either "won't fit" in the resized window requiring you to scroll horizontally or will reduce the width of the central column.

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#22
post #16
post #6

Well, I really like being able to put a code editor on the left and then a browser, terminal, document, LaTeX output on the right of the screen without them becoming too constrained horizontally. But probably this is a very particular use case?

If you take the same width of screen, e.g. 1920 pixels and make it taller, say, 1440 pixels, then you have the same horizontal space and all of those windows are taller with more content in them!

Isn't this just saying "if you make the screen bigger, you get more space"?

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#23
I wouldn't have ever guessed I'd love the 3:2 of my Surface but I agree with this article.

I'd still probably choose 16:10 because it's close enough, but 16:9 bugs me to no end (LENOVO) when there's a huge bezel above and below the screen.

At high enough resolution the side bar development doesn't impede me anymore (1600x1200 seemed good, 1400x1050 a little less on my old Thinkpads).

If the Surface were just more reliable I'd consider it. Until them I'm still using Thinkpads (in spite of their own shortcomings).

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#26
What a moronic article. More space is always better. On Windows/Linux just chuck the taskbar on the left/right of the screen and enjoy the extra visible space.

The shit some people complain about , unbelieavable......

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#28
post #3
post #2

Pro tip: put the toolbar on the left side of the screen rather than the the bottom location.

That doesn’t work well for toolbars which have text labels ( like bookmarks or a windows style taskbar).

Not sure what you're thinking of but check out the Tree Style Tabs browse plugin to see what they mean. Tabs with text work perfectly.

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#29
post #6

Well, I really like being able to put a code editor on the left and then a browser, terminal, document, LaTeX output on the right of the screen without them becoming too constrained horizontally. But probably this is a very particular use case?

The "nominally widescreen" 16:10 aspect ratio great for this. Anything shorter than that feels cramped to me.

[deleted]

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#30
post #15

The big problem I have started seeing is web design assuming you always browse using a maximized window. Combine this with a prevalent market of wide screens and most sites won’t look right without at least 1200px. So once you put anything like a toolbar or inspector on this side, you have a problem. Designers of many sites I have to use daily seem to assume I’d never want to see two windows at once, let alone rearra…

> The big problem I have started seeing is web design assuming you always browse using a maximized window.

That's been a problem for roughly twenty years now. Way back in the 1990s (on a 4:3 CRT, natch) I started out with half the screen dedicated to my browser and the other half left free for other things (back in those days it was normal to have many windows open at once on a Mac screen — weird how we have so many more pixels now, but typically just have one thing on the screen at a time!).

Eventually I had to stop doing that, because so many sites assumed that I'd have the browser opened full-screen. At the time, I believed that to have originally been a Windows-ism, but I don't know anymore if that was really the case.

Even though I love my tiling WM, I do kinda miss the days when I'd have multiple windows open. Now, I have a second, portrait-mode, monitory — but I only have code on it, and leave my browser on the landscape-mode screen.

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