Widescreen a bit disapointing

N9eav

I have just set up my new desktop with a HD widescreen monitor.

The picture is fantastic, but most web pages seem stuck in the middle of the screen with large unusued space either side.

MSE formats to widrscreen, but BBC and many other sites don't

Is this just because they are not widescreen? Or do I need to change some settings?

Seems crazy that widescreen is about all you can buy now and yet a 22 inch monitor gives you effectively a smaller picture that a 17 inch square screen?

John_Gray

Some websites expand to fill the width available, other deliberately don't, because they want a particular look and feel. No, you can't do anything about this!

Yes, widescreen is really a backward step for monitors, because the 5x4 format is of more use for most computer programs. But it's rather difficult to find this format in screens any more.

mart44

I find widescreen monitors too wide to run browsers maximised. Dragging the edges of the browser Window in each side makes the appearance better in my opinion. A bit of spare Desktop space either side of the browser can be useful sometimes too.

Web page content can be zoomed if it's too small (Ctrl + mousewheel is one way). It's also possible to increase the size of text for other areas of Windows. For instance, Windows Explorer and icon text can become too small due to the increased native resolution of the widescreen monitor.

A web page where the content has a fixed size. An appearance I've got used to:

Humphrey10

You can get monitors and laptops that have an aspect ratio of 16:10 rather than 16:9 (which is what widescreen TVs are), which improves things slightly (but not much) as the screen is a bit squarer.

victor2

As soon as you involve graphics in a web page, you run into issues of making a page look good on widescreen versus still looking OK on "standard" screens.
Web designers have to make things as backward compatible as they reasonably can. It's always a compromise, but you would risk cutting off a significant part of your market if you designed something that only works well in widescreen. Then there's all the smartphone type devices to think of!

TheFlyingGerbil

you can move your start menu to the side of your screen instead of the bottom. That gives you move vertical space for your programs and as you said the side space is often going to waste anyway. It may take you a short while to get used to (it did for me) but once I did I never looked back.

S0litaire

or get a swivel Monitor stand instead of the standard one.
Then you can turn the monitor from landscape in to portrait and sites will fit fine ^_~ lol

fwor

The great thing about the fashion for widescreen is that you can get non-widescreen LCD monitors on eBay for peanuts.

Last one I bought a few months ago was £30, brand new!

N9eav

Thanks for the great answers. I am going to try the control bar at the side for a bit... and get used to it.