I probably never really paid much attention until I purchased my recent computer. From my perspective, it comes with a crazy wide display screen. It’s 15.6 inches wide and has a resolution of 1920×1080. It was kind of neat when I first turned it on. Look at them pixels.
The problem (or issue, it’s not really a problem) comes when you start poking around on the internet. Particularly with blogs and webpages with white backgrounds. The output is typically formatted for the lowest reasonable format which I’m guess is 1024×768. There was a time when that resolution was highly sought after. But no longer.
Now, I think we all know that you can blow up the size of your screen. If you’ve ever been in the audience of a presentation, it’s a technique that’s often done so the people in the cheap seats can see the screen. So, I figured that if it’s good enough for that purpose, why not for me?
It actually looked great. Bigger text — but it came with another problem (or, again, issue). I ended up scrolling more to read everything because while the width is nicer, the height takes a hit. So, CTRL+0 and I’m back to the default.
Every now and again, you’ll see a feature that’s included by developers that give you hope that they’re human and experiencing the same issues that you are.
Bookmarks
Every web browser that I can think of has this feature. It’s one of the first things that I turn on. I’ll tell the browser to only display bookmarks on a new tab. Otherwise, turn it off. It only makes sense. Why would I want to click on a bookmark when I’ve got an active screen and am working on it? It only makes sense to choose a bookmark in a new tab when I’m going somewhere.
Tabs
So, this was a feature from a browser a long time ago that has now emerged in Microsoft Edge. It’s yet another reason to try out this new browser.
The tab bar takes up a lot of room at the top (or bottom) of the screen. The new Edge browser addresses that and it’s perfect for those wide screens with all that wide space. Turn on vertical tabs. Instead of having your tabs across the top of the screen, put them on the left side of your display. That opens up just a little more usable room. Unless you’re a fan of staring at tabs that are open.
Most browsers have an extension to kind of do this but you end up having tabs at the top and on the side. That’s really not a solution for me. It lets you know that tabs are hard coded and can’t be played around with — unless you’re the developer.
Sometimes, it’s the little things … but if you start to accumulate little things, they turn into big things. And that can be a good thing.
doug --- off the record 