5 ms·

> It’s safest to presume that users on desktop or laptop devices are not filling their entire screen with a browser. Not on literally any laptop I've ever seen

by ghusto 3y ago

> It’s safest to presume that users on desktop or laptop devices are not filling their entire screen with a browser. Not on literally any laptop I've ever seen. I've never seen a screen where the browser _isn't_ filling all space available to them, sometimes even the entire screen (in fullscreen mode on MacOS).

sebzim4500 3y ago
I think most people have a task bar at the bottom, at least on Windows and Linux.
PMunch 3y ago
You never side by side your browser and another application like a terminal or text editor? And even barring that the taskbar of your OS along with window decorations means that your browser is seldom 100% of the screen. This is also talking about the viewport, so even though they clumsily refer to it as the "browser" the website won't be given 100% of your resolution even if your browser did have 100% simply because of things like the tabs bar and other navigation. Can you full-screen a website? Sure. But that's not the common way to browse.
- ghusto 3y ago
  > You never side by side your browser and another application like a terminal or text editor? Never. I cmd+tab between windows. What I _have_ seen is developers have those on different monitors, but even there the browser is always fullscreen. > And even barring that the taskbar of your OS along with window decorations means that your browser is seldom 100% of the screen I did mention this ;)
jerf 3y ago
I believe the intention of that statement is to not assume that it's filling the entire screen, that is, not to count on it in some manner. A lot of people still make this mistake one way or another. In about the last year I finally gave up; my tiling window manager used to have the browser at 2/3rds the screen with the remaining 1/3 a terminal, but more and more I've been encountering websites that are very unhappy with that width; not small enough to kick in mobile mode or they detect that I'm on a desktop browser and don't adjust, but not large enough for the design they serve me, creating overlapping regions, or horizontal scrolling, etc. So my browser is full screen a lot more often now. On the one hand I'm annoyed, but on the other, an implication of the article is that you essentially can't test at "all" viewport sizes anymore and it's just so easy to accidentally write a website that is unhappy at exactly pixel widths 892-945 when used with my exact font setup and/or zoom setting that I can't really stay mad at some of these sites. Some of the sites I have trouble with are clearly trying, and are competent in many other ways. You can hardly expect your designers to visit every page on your site and test every single width from 200 to 2000 one pixel at at time, let alone ask them to do it again with a variety of zoom settings. Heck, I can't even tell you my own website can do that. I've checked it on a phone and in my desktop browser at a couple of sizes, but I can't do it anymore than anyone else can nowadays.
- Kerrick 3y ago
  I’ve noticed similar annoyances lately browsing sites on my 4K displays set to 200% scaling and positioned vertically. Sites tend not to work or look their best at 1080px wide anymore. It almost makes me nostalgic for 960px being the defacto standard width for desktop sites.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
You've never seen a 17"+ laptop I guess?
- bandergirl 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - mcv 3y ago
    I recently bought a 4K screen specifically to be able to have an IDE and a browser next to each other. Every once in a while there's an app that thinks that all of that screen real estate is really all just for them. It's not.
    - bandergirl 3y ago
      Placing windows side by side is the correct usage of the available space, I hold no qualms against you.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I have a 27" display and browse with the browser window maximized. I paid for this display, and I expect to use every pixel. Web designers, however, seem to hate me for it and choose to constrain the width of their content to a tiny, 6cm column down the middle of my display, leaving 80% of the width as whitespace.
    - bandergirl 3y ago
      Clear case of you’re using it wrong I don’t know how you expect a designer to fill 27” with an article. Surely they could add several columns just for you, though, a great investment of team hours. There are very few types of websites that benefit from all that space and it’s usually video and photos.
DylanSp 3y ago
My guess is that filling the entire entire screen is common, especially on laptops that aren't hooked up to a monitor, but not common enough to assume that'll always be the case.
flohofwoe 3y ago
That's the definition of 'anectodal evidence' though. The nice thing of desktop environments is that people (still) have enough freedom to organize windows the way they want without a platform owner telling them what's "best for them".
MrJohz 3y ago
For general browsing, that's often the case, but for solving tasks, I often see people using the "snap to side" feature in Windows. It means you can view two windows side-by-side without faffing around dragging window sides around, and it's really useful if you're trying to cross-reference data on a smaller screen. Although I think that sentence would probably be better written "It's safest not to presume [...]", as in, don't make assumptions about screen sizes here.
amiga-workbench 3y ago
Its a Mac user thing, they have a collage of overlapping randomly shaped windows splayed everywhere. Windows users tend to just maximise their programs or snap them when needing to multitask. Gnome pushes users to fullscreen programs too, with a quick mouse twitch to get the overview open to switch programs.
- chc 3y ago
  A lot of Linux users tile their windows too.
bee_rider 3y ago
It just seems like confusing wording. I think you are right that most people use their programs full-screen on laptops (As an aside, it is funny that thin-and-light-ism has managed to progress to the point where the average person finally gets the 2008 experience). But I think what they meant is: it is safest not to presume that desktop or laptop users are filling their entire screen with a browser. The way they wrote it suggest that the assumption of the negative is safest, while the way I wrote it says it is safest not to make the assumption. This has a general smell of the inverse fallacy, although it isn’t like they are trying to make some bulletproof logical deduction anyway.
- catapart 3y ago
  I'm kind of surprised here, myself, and am very interested in seeing real numbers because, just from the replies to this comment I'm seeing a lot of difference of opinion. Personally, I always use a browser full screen and most everything else is 'windowed'. My browser usually ends up being the "background" of my monitor, only traded out when I'm writing code, in which case my IDE is the "background" (full screen). Everything else except games runs in a smaller window. Dragging and dropping still works, like that. It's just really convenient. From mostly working with other devs, this is usually what I see. This is how I see MOST people use their desktops. Full screen browser, always. Then we get to this article and this comment section and people are talking like it's a given that MOST people use their browsers in windowed mode. Personally, the only time I can even remember someone doing that is when they snap it to an area and then snap something else beside it. My suspicion is this is a Windows/Linux vs Mac thing? Everything in Mac defaults to "floating" app windows, instead of defaulting to a single app window, maximized, with sub-panel windows inside the app renderer. So people just kind of mentally map it that way, depending on the OS? But then, that's just a guess! Obviously, I don't mean to imply that one way is better or worse. I'm just kind of intrigued by how blindsided I - and apparently others - are about this. Anyway, you're right about the article's hand-waving. It's not as compelling to me, because I've had users file tickets when our "anything past 1060px gets centered on the screen, instead of expanding to fill" method was displayed on a 4K screen. They claimed it was "unusable", even though it was entirely the same, it just didn't expand as much as they would have like (yes, even on a TV; other users were using it just fine). So I don't think anything past 800 is less worth consideration. At the very least, I'd say that number is more like 960 or 1400. The upper end of standard desktop sizes instead of the lower. At 800px width, even default browser font sizes look big. Scaling down to a 10 or 11px font size is fine for complex utilities, but when you're trying to size it for big, finger-sized buttons, 800px gets cramped, fast. But yeah, the overall advice holds.
kube-system 3y ago
I presume you're talking about maximized windows, but that still does not equal "filling the entire screen", because browsers have their own user interface around the viewport. Go maximize your browser and enter this into your dev tools: console.log(`${window.innerWidth}x${window.innerHeight}`) Does that equal your screen resolution?
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  I like this because opening the dev tools has a high chance of changing innerHeight :)
  - kube-system 3y ago
    And even if you open dev tools in another window, many people run browsers that are configured to display other controls... like tabs, or an address bar.
- ghusto 3y ago
  I did differentiate here ;) and even mentioned that I "sometimes even [see] the entire screen (in fullscreen mode on MacOS) [being used]"
  - kube-system 3y ago
    Full-screen mode on MacOS in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox also show tabs and an address bar by default. Yes, full-screen mode hides the dock and the menu bar, but it still does not make the viewport equal to the screen resolution.

by ghusto 3y ago

sebzim4500 3y ago

I think most people have a task bar at the bottom, at least on Windows and Linux.

PMunch 3y ago

You never side by side your browser and another application like a terminal or text editor? And even barring that the taskbar of your OS along with window decorations means that your browser is seldom 100% of the screen. This is also talking about the viewport, so even though they clumsily refer to it as the "browser" the website won't be given 100% of your resolution even if your browser did have 100% simply because of things like the tabs bar and other navigation. Can you full-screen a website? Sure. But that's not the common way to browse.

ghusto 3y ago
> You never side by side your browser and another application like a terminal or text editor? Never. I cmd+tab between windows. What I _have_ seen is developers have those on different monitors, but even there the browser is always fullscreen. > And even barring that the taskbar of your OS along with window decorations means that your browser is seldom 100% of the screen I did mention this ;)

jerf 3y ago

I believe the intention of that statement is to not assume that it's filling the entire screen, that is, not to count on it in some manner. A lot of people still make this mistake one way or another. In about the last year I finally gave up; my tiling window manager used to have the browser at 2/3rds the screen with the remaining 1/3 a terminal, but more and more I've been encountering websites that are very unhappy with that width; not small enough to kick in mobile mode or they detect that I'm on a desktop browser and don't adjust, but not large enough for the design they serve me, creating overlapping regions, or horizontal scrolling, etc. So my browser is full screen a lot more often now. On the one hand I'm annoyed, but on the other, an implication of the article is that you essentially can't test at "all" viewport sizes anymore and it's just so easy to accidentally write a website that is unhappy at exactly pixel widths 892-945 when used with my exact font setup and/or zoom setting that I can't really stay mad at some of these sites. Some of the sites I have trouble with are clearly trying, and are competent in many other ways. You can hardly expect your designers to visit every page on your site and test every single width from 200 to 2000 one pixel at at time, let alone ask them to do it again with a variety of zoom settings. Heck, I can't even tell you my own website can do that. I've checked it on a phone and in my desktop browser at a couple of sizes, but I can't do it anymore than anyone else can nowadays.

Kerrick 3y ago
I’ve noticed similar annoyances lately browsing sites on my 4K displays set to 200% scaling and positioned vertically. Sites tend not to work or look their best at 1080px wide anymore. It almost makes me nostalgic for 960px being the defacto standard width for desktop sites.

marginalia_nu 3y ago

You've never seen a 17"+ laptop I guess?

bandergirl 3y ago
[flagged]
- mcv 3y ago
  I recently bought a 4K screen specifically to be able to have an IDE and a browser next to each other. Every once in a while there's an app that thinks that all of that screen real estate is really all just for them. It's not.
  - bandergirl 3y ago
    Placing windows side by side is the correct usage of the available space, I hold no qualms against you.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I have a 27" display and browse with the browser window maximized. I paid for this display, and I expect to use every pixel. Web designers, however, seem to hate me for it and choose to constrain the width of their content to a tiny, 6cm column down the middle of my display, leaving 80% of the width as whitespace.
  - bandergirl 3y ago
    Clear case of you’re using it wrong I don’t know how you expect a designer to fill 27” with an article. Surely they could add several columns just for you, though, a great investment of team hours. There are very few types of websites that benefit from all that space and it’s usually video and photos.

DylanSp 3y ago

My guess is that filling the entire entire screen is common, especially on laptops that aren't hooked up to a monitor, but not common enough to assume that'll always be the case.

flohofwoe 3y ago

That's the definition of 'anectodal evidence' though. The nice thing of desktop environments is that people (still) have enough freedom to organize windows the way they want without a platform owner telling them what's "best for them".

MrJohz 3y ago

For general browsing, that's often the case, but for solving tasks, I often see people using the "snap to side" feature in Windows. It means you can view two windows side-by-side without faffing around dragging window sides around, and it's really useful if you're trying to cross-reference data on a smaller screen. Although I think that sentence would probably be better written "It's safest not to presume [...]", as in, don't make assumptions about screen sizes here.

amiga-workbench 3y ago

Its a Mac user thing, they have a collage of overlapping randomly shaped windows splayed everywhere. Windows users tend to just maximise their programs or snap them when needing to multitask. Gnome pushes users to fullscreen programs too, with a quick mouse twitch to get the overview open to switch programs.

chc 3y ago
A lot of Linux users tile their windows too.

bee_rider 3y ago

It just seems like confusing wording. I think you are right that most people use their programs full-screen on laptops (As an aside, it is funny that thin-and-light-ism has managed to progress to the point where the average person finally gets the 2008 experience). But I think what they meant is: it is safest not to presume that desktop or laptop users are filling their entire screen with a browser. The way they wrote it suggest that the assumption of the negative is safest, while the way I wrote it says it is safest not to make the assumption. This has a general smell of the inverse fallacy, although it isn’t like they are trying to make some bulletproof logical deduction anyway.

catapart 3y ago
I'm kind of surprised here, myself, and am very interested in seeing real numbers because, just from the replies to this comment I'm seeing a lot of difference of opinion. Personally, I always use a browser full screen and most everything else is 'windowed'. My browser usually ends up being the "background" of my monitor, only traded out when I'm writing code, in which case my IDE is the "background" (full screen). Everything else except games runs in a smaller window. Dragging and dropping still works, like that. It's just really convenient. From mostly working with other devs, this is usually what I see. This is how I see MOST people use their desktops. Full screen browser, always. Then we get to this article and this comment section and people are talking like it's a given that MOST people use their browsers in windowed mode. Personally, the only time I can even remember someone doing that is when they snap it to an area and then snap something else beside it. My suspicion is this is a Windows/Linux vs Mac thing? Everything in Mac defaults to "floating" app windows, instead of defaulting to a single app window, maximized, with sub-panel windows inside the app renderer. So people just kind of mentally map it that way, depending on the OS? But then, that's just a guess! Obviously, I don't mean to imply that one way is better or worse. I'm just kind of intrigued by how blindsided I - and apparently others - are about this. Anyway, you're right about the article's hand-waving. It's not as compelling to me, because I've had users file tickets when our "anything past 1060px gets centered on the screen, instead of expanding to fill" method was displayed on a 4K screen. They claimed it was "unusable", even though it was entirely the same, it just didn't expand as much as they would have like (yes, even on a TV; other users were using it just fine). So I don't think anything past 800 is less worth consideration. At the very least, I'd say that number is more like 960 or 1400. The upper end of standard desktop sizes instead of the lower. At 800px width, even default browser font sizes look big. Scaling down to a 10 or 11px font size is fine for complex utilities, but when you're trying to size it for big, finger-sized buttons, 800px gets cramped, fast. But yeah, the overall advice holds.

kube-system 3y ago

I presume you're talking about maximized windows, but that still does not equal "filling the entire screen", because browsers have their own user interface around the viewport. Go maximize your browser and enter this into your dev tools: console.log(`${window.innerWidth}x${window.innerHeight}`) Does that equal your screen resolution?

madeofpalk 3y ago
I like this because opening the dev tools has a high chance of changing innerHeight :)
- kube-system 3y ago
  And even if you open dev tools in another window, many people run browsers that are configured to display other controls... like tabs, or an address bar.
ghusto 3y ago
I did differentiate here ;) and even mentioned that I "sometimes even [see] the entire screen (in fullscreen mode on MacOS) [being used]"
- kube-system 3y ago
  Full-screen mode on MacOS in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox also show tabs and an address bar by default. Yes, full-screen mode hides the dock and the menu bar, but it still does not make the viewport equal to the screen resolution.