5 ms·

The idea that anyone wouldn’t maximize all applications, especially their browser, is utterly bewildering to me.

mcbutterbunz 6y ago
That's my feeling as well. I bought a large monitor with nice resolution and I want to run my applications at full size. Window tiling is nice but its also a distraction for me and I always seem to forget which app has focus.
badsectoracula 6y ago
I do not maximize some of my applications because i want to have several of them visible at any time when i'm working on more than one. I do maximize some other applications, depending on what i'm doing. I do not maximize the browser because i want to have the content i'm working with/looking at/reading in front of me (especially on the reading aspect since reading long lines is tiresome) and maximizing on a 16:9 monitor means that a lot of content will be at the sides. Now combine the above with the fact that i'm using a ~23" 1366x768 monitor, the tendency of pretty much every site out there to use the window width as a means to differentiate between mobile and desktop sites and the stupid trend to use ginormous font sizes everywhere and you get an idea of how much i like browsing many sites out there (at least HN and old Reddit is perfectly fine). Well, i'm thankful that browsers have a zoom option at least, many of the sites out there are only usable at a 70-80% zoom for me. But yeah, last time i had my browser maximized all the time was when i had a 4:3 monitor.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  There are better monitors at my local thrift store for 5 dollars. It's like 68ppi the last monitor I had like that had a huge floppy drive and kings quest III. It's time to upgrade.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    No there are certainly not better monitors at your thrift store for $5 dollars. This is a brand new monitor i bought some months ago (late 2019) and the cost was much bigger than 5 dollars. In fact it was the most expensive VA monitor at this resolution (i avoid IPS because i actually want to be able to see dark colors and contrast and every single IPS monitor i've used, regardless of resolution, is garbage when it comes to that with the awful backlight glow), it has a ton of inputs at the back, relatively fast response time (for VA), etc. It is one of the best monitors i ever had. The resolution was something i explicitly opted for, partly because at the time i had an APU-based system that i wanted to game on and i didn't want the blurry mess that a higher resolution would have and partly because 1366x768 on a monitor (as opposed to laptop) makes for very sharp icons, fonts (after you disable antialiasing) for everything (as opposed to using a hidpi monitor where some apps look crisp and others look either too tiny or blurred from scaling). Also as a (very high) bonus, it looks great when playing older games that often use 1024x768 as a resolution since i have 1:1 mapping there. Finally 1366x768 is currently by far the most common resolution on PCs (mainly thanks to laptops, but desktops use it too - see mine) according to statcounter and the second most common on gaming PCs according to Steam, so it isn't something you'd only find in obscure old PCs, it is as mainstream as it gets.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      >1366x768 is currently by far the most common resolution on PCs According to steam 10.9% of users are running at that resolution. Only 4% are running at worse and 85% are running at higher resolution mostly at 1080p at a whopping 65%. Calling it the second most common is true but deceptive is it just means that its so old that there are so many different better choices that people are spread out over the many and varied better choices. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... >i didn't want the blurry mess that a higher resolution would have https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/285860-720p-looks-bad-on-1080p-monitor/ https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/285860-720p-looks-bad-o... If you mean that your apu is so weak that it can't do more than 720p and this would look bad at 1080p you are correct but that seems like a uniquely bad choice given that one would logically want to either get an actual gpu or give up on gaming and get a screen worth using instead of picking a compromise that is the worst of both worlds. Regarding scalling 800x600 scales evenly to a 1920x1200 with black bars on the sides. 1152×900 scales to 1600x900 in the same fashion. You can also run the game in a window and avoid having to match it up evenly. >1366x768 on a monitor (as opposed to laptop) makes for very sharp icons, fonts (after you disable antialiasing) for everything (as opposed to using a hidpi monitor where some apps look crisp and others look either too tiny or blurred from scaling). I think your eyesight is bad. Your PPI: 68 Common Resolution for your screen size: 95 Best in class: 191
- aembleton 6y ago
  > the tendency of pretty much every site out there to use the window width as a means to differentiate between mobile and desktop sites How would you differentiate them? At least with the width you can use css media queries so no Javascript is needed.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    By using some mobile specific pseudo-selector? There are pseudo-selectors for printing, there could be selectors for mobile too. Not sure, i'm not into web development, i just see using the window width as the wrong way. I keep my window down to that size even when i'm using monitors with larger resolutions (1080p or 1440p), it is a bad idea to assume window width == monitor resolution == device type.
_AzMoo 6y ago
And thus the overwhelming challenge of UX becomes clear. People like different things. I don't maximise any of my windows.
- smabie 6y ago
  Yeah, it feels weird. I haven't maximized a window in a long long time. Well unless watching a video counts.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  I use a tiling window manager, meaning all windows combined take up 100% of the screen, and all of them are always visible. The only UIs that never handle this correctly are modern, responsive websites which sometimes become unusable and show baffling design decisions at certain window sizes. Although in the case of Reddit the old design isn't perfect either, because if the browser window is narrow enough it'll have a bug where you can shift the whole website out of the visible area by writing a long line in a comment. To be clear, I know this is not a trivial thing, but when UI designers don't know how to handle certain viewport sizes they should rather just let the browser's scrollbars do the job they've been doing fine for decades.
smabie 6y ago
It's bewildering to you that people want to look at multiple windows at the same time? Really?
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  When I have two apps side by side, they’re both maximized in split screen mode. This is a rare occurrence.
  - smabie 6y ago
    I guess I don't have a split screen mode on my window manager, so I just keep a bunch of small windows floating around.
mrmonkeyman 6y ago
It's for people who actually have to process a lot of information and do it quick.

That's my feeling as well. I bought a large monitor with nice resolution and I want to run my applications at full size. Window tiling is nice but its also a distraction for me and I always seem to forget which app has focus.

badsectoracula 6y ago

I do not maximize some of my applications because i want to have several of them visible at any time when i'm working on more than one. I do maximize some other applications, depending on what i'm doing. I do not maximize the browser because i want to have the content i'm working with/looking at/reading in front of me (especially on the reading aspect since reading long lines is tiresome) and maximizing on a 16:9 monitor means that a lot of content will be at the sides. Now combine the above with the fact that i'm using a ~23" 1366x768 monitor, the tendency of pretty much every site out there to use the window width as a means to differentiate between mobile and desktop sites and the stupid trend to use ginormous font sizes everywhere and you get an idea of how much i like browsing many sites out there (at least HN and old Reddit is perfectly fine). Well, i'm thankful that browsers have a zoom option at least, many of the sites out there are only usable at a 70-80% zoom for me. But yeah, last time i had my browser maximized all the time was when i had a 4:3 monitor.

michaelmrose 6y ago
There are better monitors at my local thrift store for 5 dollars. It's like 68ppi the last monitor I had like that had a huge floppy drive and kings quest III. It's time to upgrade.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  No there are certainly not better monitors at your thrift store for $5 dollars. This is a brand new monitor i bought some months ago (late 2019) and the cost was much bigger than 5 dollars. In fact it was the most expensive VA monitor at this resolution (i avoid IPS because i actually want to be able to see dark colors and contrast and every single IPS monitor i've used, regardless of resolution, is garbage when it comes to that with the awful backlight glow), it has a ton of inputs at the back, relatively fast response time (for VA), etc. It is one of the best monitors i ever had. The resolution was something i explicitly opted for, partly because at the time i had an APU-based system that i wanted to game on and i didn't want the blurry mess that a higher resolution would have and partly because 1366x768 on a monitor (as opposed to laptop) makes for very sharp icons, fonts (after you disable antialiasing) for everything (as opposed to using a hidpi monitor where some apps look crisp and others look either too tiny or blurred from scaling). Also as a (very high) bonus, it looks great when playing older games that often use 1024x768 as a resolution since i have 1:1 mapping there. Finally 1366x768 is currently by far the most common resolution on PCs (mainly thanks to laptops, but desktops use it too - see mine) according to statcounter and the second most common on gaming PCs according to Steam, so it isn't something you'd only find in obscure old PCs, it is as mainstream as it gets.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    >1366x768 is currently by far the most common resolution on PCs According to steam 10.9% of users are running at that resolution. Only 4% are running at worse and 85% are running at higher resolution mostly at 1080p at a whopping 65%. Calling it the second most common is true but deceptive is it just means that its so old that there are so many different better choices that people are spread out over the many and varied better choices. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... >i didn't want the blurry mess that a higher resolution would have https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/285860-720p-looks-bad-on-1080p-monitor/ https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/285860-720p-looks-bad-o... If you mean that your apu is so weak that it can't do more than 720p and this would look bad at 1080p you are correct but that seems like a uniquely bad choice given that one would logically want to either get an actual gpu or give up on gaming and get a screen worth using instead of picking a compromise that is the worst of both worlds. Regarding scalling 800x600 scales evenly to a 1920x1200 with black bars on the sides. 1152×900 scales to 1600x900 in the same fashion. You can also run the game in a window and avoid having to match it up evenly. >1366x768 on a monitor (as opposed to laptop) makes for very sharp icons, fonts (after you disable antialiasing) for everything (as opposed to using a hidpi monitor where some apps look crisp and others look either too tiny or blurred from scaling). I think your eyesight is bad. Your PPI: 68 Common Resolution for your screen size: 95 Best in class: 191
aembleton 6y ago
> the tendency of pretty much every site out there to use the window width as a means to differentiate between mobile and desktop sites How would you differentiate them? At least with the width you can use css media queries so no Javascript is needed.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  By using some mobile specific pseudo-selector? There are pseudo-selectors for printing, there could be selectors for mobile too. Not sure, i'm not into web development, i just see using the window width as the wrong way. I keep my window down to that size even when i'm using monitors with larger resolutions (1080p or 1440p), it is a bad idea to assume window width == monitor resolution == device type.

_AzMoo 6y ago

And thus the overwhelming challenge of UX becomes clear. People like different things. I don't maximise any of my windows.

smabie 6y ago
Yeah, it feels weird. I haven't maximized a window in a long long time. Well unless watching a video counts.
alpaca128 6y ago
I use a tiling window manager, meaning all windows combined take up 100% of the screen, and all of them are always visible. The only UIs that never handle this correctly are modern, responsive websites which sometimes become unusable and show baffling design decisions at certain window sizes. Although in the case of Reddit the old design isn't perfect either, because if the browser window is narrow enough it'll have a bug where you can shift the whole website out of the visible area by writing a long line in a comment. To be clear, I know this is not a trivial thing, but when UI designers don't know how to handle certain viewport sizes they should rather just let the browser's scrollbars do the job they've been doing fine for decades.

smabie 6y ago

It's bewildering to you that people want to look at multiple windows at the same time? Really?

ashtonkem 6y ago
When I have two apps side by side, they’re both maximized in split screen mode. This is a rare occurrence.
- smabie 6y ago
  I guess I don't have a split screen mode on my window manager, so I just keep a bunch of small windows floating around.

mrmonkeyman 6y ago

It's for people who actually have to process a lot of information and do it quick.