Because our eyes are side-by-side. Have you ever rotated a pair of 24" widescreens vertically? They are taller than your vertical field of view. Widescreens ma

Because our eyes are side-by-side. Have you ever rotated a pair of 24" widescreens vertically? They are taller than your vertical field of view. Widescreens make sense for all sorts of things, especially video. Just because they don't make sense for reading lots of text doesn't mean the space is wasted. With a tiling window manager (http://awesome.naquadah.org http://awesome.naquadah.org), you just put two windows side-by-side anyway.