Posted in Tips on 20. Mar, 2010
Ok, so here’s an interesting Windows problem. What happens when you have a big monitor, especially a widescreen monitor, and you wanna’ browse the web? A big monitor typically means higher resolution. That means you have more up and down space to see the page. But you also have more left and right space, and the problem is that 95% of web pages out there have “fixed widths”, which means no matter how much extra side space you have, the web page will only be one particular width. This is even more noticeable on widescreen monitors. So what your left with is a bunch of content in the center of your big ‘ol screen with a bunch of nothingness (dead space) on the sides.
So when it comes to browsing the web, your browser fills up your entire screen even though the web page may only take up 75% to 30% of your screen. But that’s just life, right? No, it doesn’t have to be.
PC Users Can Learn From 27″ Macs
The Apple Safari browser has a feature I really like. Have you ever been on one of those huge 27″ iMacs at the Apple store or at Best Buy? Those ***** are huge! I love’em. Browsing the web on those babies must be a big waste, right? No. When you maximize the Safari, Apple’s browser, it maximizes top to bottom, but it expands left and right only to the size of the web page. There’s a small percentage of people still using older computers set with a low resolution of 800 x 600. Just to give you an idea of how extremely tiny that crap is, 15.4″ widescreen laptops and 19″ monitors use a resolution of 1366 x 768. The largest non-eye squinting resolution, let’s take the 27″ iMac for instance, is 2560 x 1,440. Think about that. Widescreen resolution can go from a width of 1366 to a width of 2560, yet most web pages all have a fixed width of 800. See the problem?
That’s why Apple updated Safari a while back to that if you wanted to maximize a web page, it would maximize the width of the web page so that your entire screen wasn’t filled with the dead space of the web page.
Why Safari’s Maximizing Makes Sense
The reason why Safari does this is because your browser doesn’t do you much good if you can only see one page open at a time on a very big monitor, or can’t see anything else until you minimize. I mean think about it, would it make much since to use a small program, such as the calculator, but have it take up the entire screen? Of course not, and that’s Safari’s thinking on the Mac. People would be less inclined to buy or use a big screened Mac if they saw a tiny web page taking up 100% of the screen.
Using this method, Apple encourages you to have more web pages open on the same screen or to have more things open while you have a web page up. The bad news is that Internet Explore, Firefox and my browser of choice, Google Chrome, all don’t do this. But Windows 7 can help.
Rockin’ Windows 7’s New Maximizing Feature
Take a look at the screen shots taken with the Neonote below. The Neonote is a widescreen 15.4″ Hp Pavalion DV6 runnin’ Windows 7 at 1366 x 768 resolution.
aintageek.com front page.
nytimes.com front page.
nytimes.com news story.
See all that dead space? Now aintageek.com looks good, because the “dead space” is filled with that bad *** lookin’ design I created. But look at the New York Times. You can see the dead space on the home page to the right, and on the story, you can see the dead space on either side. What a waste. It gets even worst on larger screens at higher resolutions.
But with Windows 7, there’s a new feature you can use that’ll maximize just the top and bottom of the window. You resize the browser window so that it gets close to 800 pixels. How on Earth do you do that? Oh, it’s simple. Open your browser, make sure it’s not maximized and go to a web page such as a nytimes.com article and drag the sides of the window in or out until there’s no horizontal bar on the bottom. Drag it out just a tiny bit to be extra safe. Move the window to where you want it, I have mine on the right side of the screen. Then move your cursor up to the top of the window until you see your cursor change to the move cursor and then double click. Your window will now maximize the top and bottom. (This works for all windows by the way.)
The majority of all web pages out there will now neatly fit into this window. Here’s how the same web pages look “top maximized”.
aintageek.com front page.
nytimes.com front page.
nytimes news story.
As you can see, each page not only fits perfectly, the content of the web page didn’t change at all. All we did was guesstimate the size of our window into an 800 width so that we can bring up web pages and, instead of seeing all that dead space, we instead see our desktop or any other programs we happen to have open behind it. Every once and a while, you’ll run into a web page that’s wider than 800 pixels. But the odds are, that page has some garbage ad or something BS that’s stretching the size out. I mean, after all, the content of the actual web page is much, much smaller. There won’t ever be any web pages that’ll have their normal text content be bigger than 800, and if they do, their designer’s an idiot.
Another tip, which I didn’t show in the screen shots, is to Gansta’ Leanin’ Your Windows 7 Taskbar, so that you can take up some of that extra widescreen space at the left and leave more height for windows, such as web pages.
If I help ya out, shout at me in the comments, or follow me at twitter.com/johnBbaird.
Peace, JbB
(HTML5 Elvis don’t play ’round with Flash y’all.)
Steve Jobs was talking to reporters and he had mentioned how he thought that people at Adobe were lazy for not fixing Adobe Flash security issues and all this stuff. We, as PC users, experience that (that’s where some spyware comes in now, is through Flash). He also said that’s the biggest reason why Macs crash is because of Flash issues.
He said he expects the death of Flash to happen at some point, and mentioned about how HTML5 is the future of the web. What is HTML5?
HTML5 is the proposed next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML. It aims to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based rich internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.
In the iPhone OS 3.0 update almost a year ago, the iPhone became the first (and still one of the only) phones to support true HTML5. Google Chrome gets the honor of being the first HTML5 browser also. In fact, only two browsers support HTML5 right now, Chrome and Safari (computer browser).
Well it appears Google agrees with this too, not just the fact that they included HTML5 in Chrome “lightyears” before any other browsers (Firefox still don’t support it), but they’re experimenting running Youtube without Flash. How would they do it without Flash? With HTML5. Yeah, it’s not just a pipe dream, you can test it out for yourself. You’ll need either the latest Chrome or Safari to view it. It has limited functionality because not only is it an experiment, but it’s also the first of its kind to render video via HTML5. If you’re running Google Chrome (nudge, nudge), open up a new Incognito Window to test out HTML5 Youtube, because Youtube will set all videos to render in HTML5 (which would be fine, except they don’t have full screen). That way, when you close the Incognito Window of Google Chrome, your Youtube videos will still be rendered in Flash.
I tried it out and man, it’s really nice! I mean, I can’t believe I was watching video WITHOUT Flash! Right click on the video and none of that “Adobe 10 settings…” or whatever crap you normally see.
I personally began to hate Flash the day I first got the Neocell, my iPhone. I realized why iPhones, and all other phones, don’t display Flash. Flash is a huge, horrible performance hog and although it allows you to do things on the web you could never do before, it also is limiting the web at the same time.
Like for instance, if I wanted to visit a web page from my smart phone, if that web site uses Flash in order to navigate, your instantly shut right the freak down from using the web site. I remember an auto parts suppler had their “find a part” done in Flash and it’s like, why do I need Flash to just find a part? I understand if you wanna’ watch a movie, such as on Hulu or Youtube… great, use Flash. Flash is great for video content, or playin’ browser games. Perfect, fine. But everything else impedes the internet.
Flash is the most unoptimized and performance demanding thing we experience on the web. The future of the web, a few years ago, was hailed at Flash. That would normally be true, I mean computers just keep getting faster and faster, so why not encode and render the entire web as Flash? Well you know what happened? Smartphones happened. Now the “cutting edge web browsing” was on devices powerful enough to render everything from the web, except for Flash. Flash is so horrible for smartphones that smartphones ban flash completely. The world took note of this and started advising everyone “If you want to build a web site for the future, don’t build it with Flash”.
Then another thing happened, those “fast computers” started getting… slower! Introducing the netbook, little, weak laptops that were designed for the web mainly (but were amazingly cheap, thin, light, portable and also had very long battery life). Netbooks are more than powerful enough to do the web, but Flash caused issues. A netbook can play music and have five tabs of non-Flash web sites open no prob, but start throwing a Flash site in there and the user can literally feel their performance take a hit. So more and more people started recommending web sites be built without Flash.
Now, the only thing Flash is recommended for is media delivery. Pandora runs Flash, Youtube runs Flash, etc. But smartphones have found a way to get those services with apps that access those services directly (known as “API”), and it does it all without Flash.
So users are starting to see less and less of a dependence on Flash. And from what I saw with Google’s HTML5 version of Youtube, I suspect to see the end of Adobe Flash in maybe two or three years.
That may seem crazy, but a few years back, there was the “plug-in web”. You had video content from the web that required plug-ins to run. Joost was a service that required a plug-in to run, and at the same time, it’s competitor was Youtube… Youtube didn’t need a plug-in to run as it ran on Flash, so that meant that anyone could access Youtube as long as they had Flash installed. Not only that, but any other web sites that ran on Flash would run without the user having to install anything extra. So with the installation of this “one plug-in called Flash”, hundreds of web sites could be run. You could access Youtube on granny’s computer because you didn’t have to install anything, but granny sure ‘nough didn’t want her daughter’s youngin’s installing something on her computer for something called “Joost”. (Joost, by the way, later saw the error of their ways and incorporated Flash, but by then, Joost already had one foot in the grave.)
So Flash killed the even more “evil” plug-in era of the internet. That was just about four or five years ago. I think it’s not far-fetched at all to see the same happen to Flash with HTML5. In fact, just like I sang praises of joy at the death of the plug-in web, I’m gonna’ sing praises of joy at the death of the Flash web. Although I love me some Flash-driven Hulu, I honestly believe that Flash is the new evil technology of the web.
When conversations come up about Flash or the future of the web, mention what you read here and express your own predictions and hopes for the future of the web. And at the very least, keep paying attention to more and more web sites that increase functionality and interactivity without the use of Flash. If you think I’m right or think I’m wrong, let’s here it.
Peace, JbB
