While I am sure some websites leave that space for ads. There is decades worth of research regarding readability. The amount of characters on a line influences readability a ton.
Certainly, on 16:9 ratio displays, text taking up the entire page width is just not ideal for most people. Most research points at roughly 70 characters per line being the ideal. Which means that even on a contemporary 4:3 display with a 1024x768 resolution, there will be some space on either side.
Yeah, no. I am not about to resize my browser window every single time when I switch tabs.
Line width is not something a designer came up with and just decided to force on to people. It is well-supported by research and actually proven to make text more pleasant to read.
Also, don't you think it is a bit silly that you are effectively just arguing that we all should go back to plain text with no formatting?
>I am not about to resize my browser window every single time when I switch tabs.
That's sincerely and squarely your problem to deal with.
>Line width is not something a designer came up with and just decided to force on to people. It is well-supported by research and actually proven to make text more pleasant to read.
Doesn't change my point that user preferences should be left to the user to decide.
>don't you think it is a bit silly that you are effectively just arguing that we all should go back to plain text with no formatting?
No. That is actually the ideal internet. Browsers are user agents, users should be rendering web pages as they see fit.
Practicality dictates the correct answer is somewhere in the middle, but authority resting with the users is a good thing.
> That's sincerely and squarely your problem to deal with.
User testing suggests you're very strongly in the minority here. Surely web pages being too thin is actually your problem to deal with? Can't you just configure your user agent to render the page as you prefer?
> No. That is actually the ideal internet. Browsers are user agents, users should be rendering web pages as they see fit.
Alright, fair if that is your base stance I can understand your reasoning.
If we are talking about the territory of practicality, I am fairly confident to state that most people (general audience) will have their browser window either in full screen or at the same size. So, when catering to "the masses". When dealing with longer form text, dictating the line width, given the studied benefits, to me seems like a sensible practical thing to do. Which benefits most people, except for purists like you.
Which is a long-winded way of me saying that maybe it is more your problem than it is my problem ;)
Why would you do it for every tab switch? You do it once to fit your preferred width and all websites adjust. You would probably have a shortcut for that in your window manager.
There was a great time at some point in the past where everyone went all in on responsive design and most websites behaved well, what we have nowadays is a regression in usability (at least for power users).
Some websites have one column of text. Some websites have a menu on the left as well. Some websites have menus on the left and on the right.
So no, I would not need to adjust it once as websites still have different variables that would have an effect on the line width for text.
Even with good responsive design you will run into that. Iff you are saying that with good responsive design elements move out of the way of text then you aren't really a power user in my book. Because that means you are settling for a mobile design on desktop.
In addition to all of this, I simply don't want to maintain a floating browser window as that can be a distraction. I rather have the website I am looking at and trying to focus on take up my entire screen.
While I agree with the research, let me be the judge of what works (for me..), span the text across the full width, so I can resize the window as I see fit.
It's a shame that one needs to use scrips to modify websites used daily (e.g. I do that with Github to span the full width).
