I recently tried to switch to using non-fullsize browser windows, which is pretty much the reason for windows I think, but so many sites force huge page widths that it becomes unusable.
I always use a ~1024w browser window on a 1920w screen and have no problems.
For MS Windows users, I think "Maximise Everything" is ingrained at this point, which gets increasingly ridiculous on high res screens since we don't have resolution independence.
There's diminishing returns on increasing column width; the human eye starts to get strained if reading columns wider than ~60 characters. If the increased page width is applied to design elements and increasing font size, sure. That's not so bad of an application.
However, the English language's z pattern is inherently vertical, meaning that a page should naturally have space on either side; forcing a window to fullscreen just to have a 33% column of text is asinine, and shows that the designer is a prick for thinking strictly for XP and Windows' maximize button.
You're right about Windows' "Maximize Everything" being weird, it seems more and more like it was a good stopgap for people switching over from DOS and needing all the pixels possible on a tiny screen. OS X's natural flow for page windows may get confused from time-to-time, but it's a much better solution for dealing with vertically-biased windows in a widescreen environment.
It's not necessarily something you notice. It gradually gets a bit more difficult once you start getting past that point. And you won't necessarily think "oh, this is so hard to read" either (at least at large-but-still-reasonable widths). It'll just end up being a factor you weigh (if not consciously) when deciding "okay, I've had enough with reading this" and go on to the next thing.
Hope for the future: Windows 7 introduced a new hotkey that resizes windows to take up either the left or right half of the screen: WIN+LEFTARROW or WIN+RIGHTARROW.
There are also drag cues: drag to the top to maximize, to the left or right to maximize 100% vertically and 50% horizontally on the current screen, or when resizing a window drag to an edge to maximize in that dimension.
I'd love to understand why someone would mod down my comment. I believe it's my first time, it's insightful so there was no reason to mod it down is it?
The problem is that if you don't maximize everything, you'll wind-up with a series of windows which overlap in a less than useful fashion - menus, scrollbars and headlines get obscured and you need to mouse-around-the-screen to do anything.
There are dual problems here. Window Managers are designed to give a "comforting intuitive interface" rather than an interface which lets you do things quickly. But also, manufacturers pump out wide screens intended for video viewing rather than long screens which are suited for text viewing. This also means a good portion of web pages use fixed-width pages to keep from being stretched to unreadability. But these also keep the text from being read from a narrow screen (sure, they could set a max width with CSS but fixed-width also lets the designer guarantee their design looks exactly as they wish).
No, the netbook is usually maximized (ubuntu netbook remix), but back when I had a PowerBook duo, the end of the 030era, I was running windows about 400px wide on a 640 px screen. Screens have gotten bigger, but for desktops, vie generally been at about 1/2 the screen, and laptops at 1/2-2/3 or so. I've gotten into some epic... Discussions of fluid layouts and how just because my browser was reporting lots a pixels, the layout wasn't getting them.
Usually my browser windows are about 700 pixels wide. That’s half of my horizontal pixels.
The vast majority of websites are no problem (text columns are usually no more than 700 pixels wide for readability reasons, I don’t care when I have to scroll horizontally to access other columns because my trackpad supports two-finger scrolling), some inherently need more pixels (The Big Picture wants to display big pictures and there is nothing wrong with that) and some just break (i.e. text becomes completely unreadable). I would be very happy if someone would fix those tiny minority of sometimes otherwise very fancy websites.
I recently tried to switch to using non-fullsize browser windows, which is pretty much the reason for windows I think
Yes, the idea that you would using multi, non-maximized windows at one time is behind the design of window managers.
Now, this model of interacting with a computer has been a success in the sense that it's how most computers are now organized today. However, this model has been a complete failure in the sense that few people ever use non-maximized windows because they coordinate so badly.
This is the reason browser tabs have replaced browser windows and indeed why the browser as an interface is easier to understand than the desktop interface ("just get me to a browser window and then I'll know where to go...").
