> Computers screens have gotten wider and wider, and UIs bigger and bigger
Sadly, most websites forcefully limit the width of the text. It's like they pretend our monitors are oriented to be tall rather than wide. Even HN has unnecessarily big margins. So unless I try to cram another window in my FHD monitor, I have ~50% or more completely wasted space. Margins should be 2-3 pixels wide, not 20-30% of the screen.
There are actual user studies to show that wider text is harder to read. https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
The major difference is that in the era of print, it was pretty logical where a multicolumn wide layout could go like on a newspaper, but in an desktop experience the browser markup is theoretically endless.
I can resize my window easily if I wanted shorter text. Or used ctrl-shift-m on Firefox. But I can't easily make the text longer without userscripts or addons.
> actual user studies to show that wider text is harder to read
That may apply to most people, but not to everyone.
afaict it applies to literally everyone. there's a variable "sweet spot" of course, but once you get out to "extremely wide" it's reliably worse for everyone, and there are LOADS of computer monitors that qualify for that label.
margins to control the width of large blocks of text have a ton of research in their favor, it's not just "more whitespace = more gooder" UI design madness. there's some of that of course, but there's a sane core underneath it all.
Solution: rotate your monitor 90 degrees, and inform your OS that you have done so. Now your monitor is 1080x1920. You'll actually be amazed how much more of a document fits on screen without sacrificing readability.