I prefer 4:3. I was brought up on it and it just seems right. I think a lot of the old films I watch are 4:3 anyway, unless they're 2.39:1, in which case 16:9 is hardly ideal either.
What I find really hilarious is how they sell laptops with a 16:9 screen with an OS that confiscates a wide strip at the bottom of the screen, a browser that confiscates a wide strip at the top of the screen, and then the web sites add their own massive strip of menus and crap at the top of the screen, and some cookie notice that you can't possibly agree to removes another generous strip from the bottom, so that the remaining aspect ratio for the actual content is about 9:1 and it's like peering through somebody's letterbox.
> none of the user interface people changed anything.
Like a stopped clock ubuntu got this one right.
As for aspect ratios, just pick a universal one please, I don't care which I just don't want to listen to my uncle complain about the black bars at the top/bottom when he's watching a movie.
I've been doing the same thing, it's all on the left.
I don't really know the solution for taskbars and the like.
There's sidebars, taskbars, auto-hiding and popups.
I've seen them all done poorly.
I think the worst of all are microsoft products - somehow the online interface for microsoft word is completely different from teams, but they are both uniformly awful.
Strangely I know clearly the ones I hate, but it's hard to recall the ones that work well because they're invisible.
So many websites (hacker news included) just leave so much white space either side while also making you scroll. Look at the state of reddits "new" design, it uses 25% of the width of a modern screen, its absurd. Almost everyone has 16:9/16:10 nowadays you would think they might like to utilise it better.
Absolutely agree, text has a very real limit to its width before it is hard to read.
Taking reddit as an example they stack the title and the image above each other then all the links for comments, share, save ... below that. So the entire design is vertical for each post. More than that the trending is at the top and the selector for whether you want hot/new all above it. Even on 1440p I reckon about 40% of the top of my screen goes to tab/url/boomarks and the headers of the page, none of it I care about the moment I want to read that site.
Reddit puts a bit of secondary stuff on the right but nothing on the left of the content at all. The content is literally 25% of the width of the screen, its mostly grey space and yet they have this entirely vertical design for every post and all their controls are at the top. It isn't the only possible way to do this and its terrible for wide screens of any type. The old design utilises widescreens a heck of a lot better which is I presume why it is quite popular.
Hilarious but brutally honest description of state of laptop aspect ratios!
Even Thinkpad brand has fallen to the meme of 16:9 screens... I remember all the hopes we had for a 16:10 or 3:2 Thinkpad retro :(
His point is that if 90% of the users were color blind, the accessibility options would be enabled by default. So, in accordance, if 99% of people use a wide screen, task bars and window decorations should be to the side, not top or bottom, by default.
It goes well beyond that. I can't make the bookmarks or tabs on the browser go down the side even though that would save a bunch of space vertically. Windows/Ubuntu/Mac OS all use the titlebar at the top of the window and waste vertical space even though horizontal is more in abundance and has been for at least 15 years. When you step back and look at the interface its all vertical aligned, everything is top to bottom and yet vertical space is the most precious and least wasteable, why waste 50 pixels on a titlebar and tab bar? The fact fullscreen exists for some apps says it all about the OS waste of that space.
There are a few programs that do this well. NLEs for video usually use horizontal space for the timeline and they get much better horizontal use than just about anything else I use. Photo editing software often puts toolbars on the side but even though inkscape does do this it still has a toolbar even with the tools and properties either side. But websites are mostly vertical and waste most of the space a lot of the time as are browsers. The OS wastes a bunch of vertical space where horizontal is available and the taskbar/app bar is about half of the problem.
And let's not forget the entire "mobile first" hullabaloo which organizes every site in narrow columns, so regardless what one thinks about text line length you will still have huge spaces left and right and buttons popping over what you're trying to read.
> 16:9 screens are cramped — at least compared to other options. I usually can’t comfortably work in multiple windows side by side without zooming out or doing a ton of vertical scrolling, and when I’m multitasking in Chrome, the tabs get tiny very quickly.
This doesn't really add up. When working with windows side by side, horizontal space is beneficial. And the tabs in the browser will also have more space on a wider aspect ratio. You can't have it both ways - on a wider screen, you'll have more space to put windows side by side and have a lot of tabs, on a tall screen you need to do less vertical scrolling within a window.
For certain tasks like programming, I usually find myself wanting a bigger height. Otherwise I'm opening the same file in another buffer to the side just to see two sections of a (long) function at once. I want more continuous code on my screen, not a side-by-side where instead of looking up or down (the way programs are textually structured in reality) I'm looking left and right.
yea doesn't make sense. maybe they are using a small sized screen and are getting confused by that.
personally on a laptop i prefer 3:2 for most things but on a larger monitor i like 16:9 since you can have two programs side by side.
on a 16:9 smaller laptop screen, having things like two file browsers side by side works ok, but having programs with lots of ui, adobe premier or photoshop, not so much
Most 16:9 laptops have thick bezels. They could fit a taller screen in the same space. Common 16:10 resolutions have the same number of columns as common 16:9 resolutions.
The interface for Windows et al really hasn't changed enough to utilise all the horizontal space. As I look at my screen now I am vertically constrained by the tabs, the Url bar, the bookmarks bar and the status bar and task bar and all I want to do is go down vertically to read more from the comments and articles, I have to scroll to utilise that vertical space. Conversely horizontally I have a large areaa of grey and white space wasting around 50% of the screen with literally nothing in them.
I don't want the text wider but boy do most websites do a terrible job of utilising the space I actually have. Reality is reading on 16:9 is horrible, it is too wide, text is better on 9:16. Very wide paragraphs are hard to follow. For work purposes I would probably be better off turning the screens and you see that a bunch in offices.
16:9 however is substantially better for gaming and movies than 4:3 ever was. The super ultra wides are amazing for gaming as horizontal space is the most immersion impacting.
I'm on 21:9 and it's godly. I'm even wondering if i should go wider than that for the next monitor. Taskbar autohidden and/or to the side of the screen (even on Linux its great with KDE). For productivity the wider the better. Even our vision is panoramic so it just makes sense to model our display according to that. Not to mention that cinema movies use that ratio.
If i will ever use a laptop for work, it definitely won't be standalone - it will be connected to such a monitor. For on-the-go tasks - whatever really. Just remove the hideous bezels and screen logos already and simply copy what Dell is doing with its XPS line, gang beat them up if they sue.
I recently switched from dual FHD (1920x1080) screens to a single 1:1 (1920x1920) screen.
Having that much vertical resolution is great especially when looking at documents and code, and I feel no need for a secondary screen.
I even temporarily went back to the dual FHD screen setup while in the office, and honestly it was like looking through a mailbox. Now when I see the dual screen setup with one in portrait mode, and one in landscape mode - it just looks to me like a poor solution to the problem of not having enough vertical AND horizontal resolution. For me, the square monitor solves it, but it may not be for everyone.
For those interested, the monitor in question is the Eizo FlexScan EV2730Q.
I have no issues with 16:9. I prefer something slightly narrower.
What I do mind is designers assuming that everyone has their browser maximised to a 16:9 sized window. There has been inordinate amounts of work done to make things responsive to mobile view, but then that appears to be thrown out the window when a desktop/laptop screen is detected.
On the desktop with 1920x1080 I definitely feel that 16:9 is a problem and if you expand that to 32:9 it doesn't really help. But once you go to 2560x1440 with slightly bigger screens the issue with 16:9 generally becomes wasted horizontal space.
I have found with 2x 16:9 that a lot of interfaces really haven't caught up to the widescreen aspect yet and I imagine that is worse. 32:9 is going to be great for gaming however and that is largely where I think 16:9 is much better than 4:3 and why I used triple screens in the past.
I don't know about you all, but my favorite monitor size is, by far, 9:16. Far more convenient than anything else, and I don't want a 4:3 monitor that will only swivel to 3:4.
Almost every single thing on a computer is meant to be scrolled, so 9:16 is natural for desktop UI, web pages, documents, code editing, the works. All 16:9 is good for is videos, and I have a second screen for whenever I watch those.
> Almost every single thing on a computer is meant to be scrolled, so 9:16 is natural for desktop UI, web pages, documents, code editing, the works.
I tried that once [1], but it didn't work very well for me. The monitor was 1080p, and I had trouble with desktop UIs that assumed a minimum width of 1280 (so I'd occasionally get things like the OK button truncated). Also a lot of websites (including HN) kick into mobile mode when they notice a tall aspect ratio, which was also annoying.
[1] I got a 16:9 monitor at work (I'd ordered a 16:10, but IT did a substitution in their rube-goldberg purchasing process.
> All 16:9 is good for is videos, and I have a second screen for whenever I watch those.
16:9 is a dumb aspect ration that assumes that you'll be only and always using your laptop to consume media (movies, specifically). I'm really really glad it's finally dying.
I have been using a 4:3 ThinkPad T42 with a 1400x1050 display in my teenage years and I cannot be happier.
Tall screen are just better. I remember editing a document on that 1400x1050 display was a pleasure, whereas all my schoolmates were scrolling up and down because they couldn't fit a single page on their screen (at a reasonable font size).
A lot of people got trained (by using say Windows 98 on a 12" 800x600 CRT goldfish bowl) that every window needs to be reflexively Maximized, and unfortunately some still carry that habit to this day.
Always makes me laugh to see people complain that some website has lots of empty space to the left and right of the text when they maximize it on their widescreen monitor. You're not supposed to maximize every window!
God yess!! I've always hated how pointlessly long screens 1080p screens were. It's not long enough to fit a second window at the side comfortably and on Windows there wasn't enough space vertically. On MacOS I move my Dock to the side but Windows taskbar just look horrible when docked to the side. Good riddance.
I don't care about the ratio, but please give me tall screens, with a reasonable absolute size in the vertical direction. I hate the modern trend towards stupidly short and fat screens.
The discussion doesn't seem to be differentiating between laptop and desktop screens. For laptops I agree that squarer is better, but for desktops I want as wide as possible. Having been using a 21:9 screen for the past 6 month I never want to go back. I guess that 16:9 is the compromise that is OK everywhere but isn't really great anywhere.
Laptops always have tradeoffs that involve size and overall dimensions. I'm not surprised 16:9 are popular with device makers because it means they can be smaller than laptops with other screen ratios.
If you don't like 16:9 for your home PC just rotate the monitor so you have a 9:16 instead. I find that way better for coding.
I would recommend 21:9 ultrawide. It's slightly "squished" double 4:3 screen. Works great for a lot of use cases.
I never could really use two IDEs on 16:9 screen, with 21:9 this is not an issue. With a bit higher resolution and screen size, I get all the benefits of dual monitor screen with just one screen.
What I find really hilarious is how they sell laptops with a 16:9 screen with an OS that confiscates a wide strip at the bottom of the screen, a browser that confiscates a wide strip at the top of the screen, and then the web sites add their own massive strip of menus and crap at the top of the screen, and some cookie notice that you can't possibly agree to removes another generous strip from the bottom, so that the remaining aspect ratio for the actual content is about 9:1 and it's like peering through somebody's letterbox.
"Hullo, Mrs Jones, are you all right in there?"